The Internet's Infrastructure

Kindle price just dropped to $2.99 on the Kindle version of "Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet".

Review from Scientific American:

In 2006 Alaskan senator Ted Stevens described the Internet as a “series of tubes,” a quip that earned the octogenarian widespread mockery. But as Blum notes in his charming look at the physical infrastructure that underlies the Web, Stevens wasn’t all that wrong. Bits sail through a worldwide network of fiber-optic cables and come together in junctions where Internet providers connect their pipes to the networks of others. Blum’s transcontinental journey exposes some of the important issues confronting the Internet, such as the occasional disconnect between the interests of the corporations who control the physical pipes and the good of the network as a whole. “If you believe the Internet is magic,” he writes, “then it’s hard to grasp its physical reality.” I’d turn this around: only by understanding the physical richness of the Internet can we truly grok the thorny forces that are shaping its growth. — Michael Moyer

If this is your type of thing, you'll love sci-fi legend Neal Stephenson's epic book-length (42000 words!) look at how transatlantic cable gets laid from Wired Magazine circa 1996.


Here's the middle ground I've staked out with my book collecting obsession (which combines poorly with the fact that I read as slowly as a second grader): when I hear about a great book, I add it to my queue at eReaderIQ, which notifies me when the Kindle version's price drops. Sometimes it takes years. But, this way, the books I accumulate 1. cost almost nothing, and 2. don't occupy physical space, and 3. are spread out over time. Compulsion neither fully indulged nor stanched!

Why Creative People Have Trouble Reading

I have trouble reading. I pondered it for years, watching myself carefully, and finally came to understand why: I'm creative. Ideas come. Often in profusion. And this outward flow of ideas impedes the inward flow of words.

One can't simultaneously discharge and absorb. It's a one-way valve, and you'd be crazy to favor inflow when creative outflow is the most satisfying thing in human experience. It's understandable that we innately choose not to inhibit our creative outflow, but it makes reading awfully hard (especially with insightful writing, which stimulates even more ideas!).

Very few of us are genuinely creative, yet many people, especially past a certain age, have trouble reading. So what's their disruptive outflow, if not creativity?

Answer: rich people's problems. Fake drama. Fake notions of victimhood. Endless rumination over that awful thing your teacher once said. The zillionth rehashing of the things you tell yourself about yourself. Ruing previous shortfalls, imagining future pay-offs. That's the outflow that makes it hard for non-creative people to read.

But here's the thing: That's not some rancid cheap stand-in for creativity. It's real creativity! It's world-building!

You've built an inner universe in which you're the protagonist, cinematically following dramatic arcs of triumph and failure, transporting yourself effortlessly through time and space to the third grade classroom where the teacher said that awful thing. It feels so real that you easily lose yourself...and put down the book. What else but pure creativity could build immersive, emotionally rich internal towers of brooding discontent and haughty superiority?

In fact, the supposedly non-creative - who aren't creative because they're so occupied by self-story-telling - are actually the more creative people. What they do, day in and day out, is far more impressively creative than any given Slog posting trying to figure all this stuff out!

More Seneca

Following up on yesterday's posting, see, below, more great quotes from Seneca, courtesy of mindofastoic.com. (Note: his essential "Letter's From a Stoic" can be downloaded as a PDF for free from Internet Archive. It's pretty high up my list of recommended books.)

You'll notice that the quotes are pretty much my own shtick, only more elegantly and tersely stated. I haven't read any of this since college, and had forgotten much of it. As I browse through, I find myself getting excited about how deeply it corroborates my own understanding - having goofily forgotten that it helped form my understanding.

I guess it's the same thing as when, a few years ago, I viewed a short clip of my old trombone teacher playing with the Boston Symphony, and felt gratified at how he was applying exactly my own approach...when it was, of course, exactly the other way around. (Rewatching three years later, I think I'd have played it a bit less sweetly and considerably more seductively. Ideally, Bolero should get under the listener's skin; a reaction I was working on inducing in my prime (here's an example from 1992.) Anyhoo, take it away, Seneca:

- We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

- While we wait for life, life passes.

- Cease to hope and you will cease to fear.

- Wealth is the slave of a wise man and the master of a fool.

- While we are postponing, life speeds by.

- Hang on to your youthful enthusiasms, you will be able to use them better when you are older.

- He who is brave is free.

- It is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness.

- Difficulty comes from our lack of confidence.

- Life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future.

- For many men, the acquisition of wealth does not end their troubles, it only changes them.

Goethe Quote

I added a beautifully apt quote from Goethe to my posting about Love Theater.


I found the quote second-hand in Liu Cixin's splendid sci-fi trilogy "The Three Body Problem", which I highly recommend though it takes more than half of the fat first volume to really get started.

Note: unless you're good at remembering Chinese names (I'm bad even with English ones), I'd suggest the audiobook version, where the different voice characterizations help keep the players straight (it's better, in my experience, to order the Kindle version from Amazon and then add audio for an upcharge than to spring for a standalone Audible book).

"Lost Knowledge" Found!

I recently wrote about lost knowledge, the disheartening fact that while civilization appears to be on a broadly smooth uphill curve, loads of useful knowledge, technology, and general know-how have been (and continue to be) lost to the ages.

I linked to an informational page about Benjamin Olshin's "Lost Knowledge" ("The Concept of Vanished Technologies and Other Human Histories"), which goes much broader, examining the evergreen proposition that early civilizations with sophisticated tech may have vanished tracelessly ("All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again").

For what it's worth, while one can't dispute that progress is jagged - i.e. often retrograde - and that earlier civilizations were well on their way with certain  notions and methods and contraptions we've only recently begun to regenerate (or have missed entirely), I seriously doubt there was ever a Shangri-La or Atlantis with laser scanners and mopeds that receded into the dust before history’s dawn.

But it's still a fascinating topic, and Olshin's book costs well over $100 practically everywhere, and keeps coming up in conversations of smart people, and I'm delighted to have found a free PDF download (hit "Download Original PDF")!

Another postscript: When we speak of technology, we mostly refer to gadgety/sciency tech, but creativity and spirituality might be thought of as an inner technology. That sounds funny to modern ears, but only because we've sunk so far from the ancients, and even more so from the primitives. I wrote about it years ago, in a posting about Werner Herzog's film, "The Cave of Forgotten Dreams":

[The film] takes us inside a French cave, discovered in 1994, containing the oldest known art, from some 32,000 years ago. The obvious surprise is that these ravishingly beautiful drawings are far more sophisticated than we'd have expected. The most skilled modern artists could respect them without condescension. The less obvious surprise, spoken of only indirectly, is the nature of their power. Herzog, the investigating scientists, and the cavern's discoverers all report a vivid and very chilling impression of presence in the cave.

You may squint and study the drawings as closely as you'd like, trying to pinpoint the magic, but, of course you will fail, because a lasagna's magic is never about the noodles, tomato sauce, meat, or cheese. As we analyze the art, trying to define it and conceptualize it, we miss everything. It's what's missed when our own art is viewed literally and technically. The thing our ancient forebears excelled at is the thing we've mostly lost - to the point where we can't even recognize it when it's in front of our face - or, more to the point, under our skin. We can only chatter in confusion and fear, like the cavemen probing the monolith in "2001".

"The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need" by Andrew Tobias

Andrew Tobias is one of my writing heros. I've been reading him since I was a teenager, beginning with his cheeky first book (it's actually been purged from his bibliography), "Honors Grades on 15 Hours Per Week (How To Keep Studies From Interfering With Your College Education)". The hypothesis was that real growth in college comes from social activities, extracurriculars, and higher-level pondering, rather than firmly implanting quadratic equations and papal lineages (you should learn the equations and lineages well enough to regurgitate them on the exam, but, yeegads, don't, like, master them!).

I took it to heart and graduated in three years (with honors, just like he said), while working a part time job (delivering campus newspapers), playing music gigs in town on the weekends, helping run the campus radio station and science fiction convention, having my heart broken a few times, and learning to drink, smoke pot, play foosball, and pull all-nighters. Tobias' approach worked, and his hypothesis proved true: I got what I needed from college without spending eons hunkering down in the library (my big trick: I wrote term papers so brightly entertaining that grateful profs - normally forced to read turd after soporific turd - would gratefully underweigh my so-so exam grades).

I read everything Tobias wrote after that. It was mostly topics I didn't care about (financial stuff, and, later, gay stuff), but his writing was so clever and satisfying that I sopped up every word.

His magnum opus is "The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need", a book so celebrated that Mark Cuban's superlative blurb ("This is the only investment book I have read that truly makes sense") barely makes the cut, coming well after quotes from "giggirl" and "J. Tussing 'Sales Coach'". It's been in print forever, and updated so many times that Tobias no longer even bothers to lampoon the obvious irony of updating "The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need". Paradoxically, this book is what it claims to be and I eagerly look forward to new editions. The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, so I guess I'm killing it.

Consider this passage from the new edition on budgeting:

Where would you like to be a year from now? "Out of debt" might be an appropriate goal. And two years from now? "Out of debt with $5,000 in an IRA and $2,000 in the bank and a sound system that will wake up the dead." And five years from now? "A net worth of $60,000 headed for a million."

It is to reach these goals that you make your budget. Write them down on the second page of your yellow legal pad. Don't make them too aggressive. Try to set goals that, after going back and forth with your budget for a while, you secretly think you'll be able to exceed. If you aim too high, you'll never feel you're doing well enough. You can still have unwritten goals and hopes and dreams -- by all means! -- but think of them (and not too often, if you can help it) as icing on the cake. Sure you want a BMW. Everybody seems to want one (not me -- I want to be invisible and to fly). But it's really nuts to want one so much you're unhappy you don't have one.

DO YOU SEE WHERE I GET MY STUFF FROM??? Not just my writing style (a chunk of it, anyway), but my perspective, and my writerly delight in provoking shifts of perspective.

Notice the playful adjustment of perspective; the self-aware hacking (so much hacking in so few sentences!!) of emotion and expectation to engineer a desired result; the warmly gleeful clarity and rationality (as opposed to colder forms of clarity and rationality, which do not appeal to me).

Reread it a couple times, and perhaps you'll notice he's actually hypnotizing the reader; literally transforming perspective on the fly. Consider that final sentence, sharp (and deadly) as a dagger. It leaves you rethinking everything, reframing all that's ever needlessly gotten you down. Silly rabbit! Did you ever imagine a writer could extricate readers from human foible in one single paragraph, and with nary a heavy-handed preach?

I'm not overstating it. Read it again! Read it ten times! This is witchcraft (messianic, even). You are not the same person by the end of that paragraph that you were going in!

As for the investment advice, it left me level-headed about money through poverty and (mild) bounty. I can think of no greater testament.

Buy this book to learn how to invest. Buy it to learn how to write. And buy it to learn how to live - in warm rationality via the cultivated ability to blithely shift perspective/reframe and to savvily self-hack (not "harshly discipline") your natural drives and inclinations.

Whence Zeitgeists? Why Cocktails Got Good

Good book
Good review of the book (my favorite line: "These passages will allow you to convince yourself, and perhaps even your spouse, that your interest in getting wasted is an academic pursuit.")

In the early 1990s, I knew exactly two people making super great cocktails. There was the main dude at Angel's Share, a new (at the time) backroom Japanese East Village cocktail lounge hunkering behind a Korean restaurant, and there was the legendary Dale DeGroff, who I respected entirely on reputation (I tried his stuff once under suboptimal conditions at a book party, and it was just okay, but I got the impression he'd be great in his natural habitat). And now I know a slew of places for cocktails at that level.

That's a viewpoint enabled by being old. Younger people can't make facile comparisons spanning three decades and requiring experienced discretion at both sides of the chasm.

Is this like the four minute mile, which was a daunting benchmark until Roger Bannister hit it and then suddenly everyone could? Has mixological talent and genius gone, like, viral? Whence zeitgeists?

I frequently return to a dandy framing I learned from my old friend Elliot, who taught me that an overly tannic wine is either overly tannic, or else it's lacking in everything else (so the tannins stick out). And this is that situation.

Until recently, crappy bartenders made crappy cocktails from crappy ingredients with a crappy attitude. Now, a bunch of them make an effort, and, surprise, when you try harder than a 7-11 clerk does with the hot dogs, the result tastes way better.

So the whole thing is a bit of a shaggy dog story. From my framing as an old guy able to offer then/now comparisons for a number of zeitgeists, I see that it's nearly always thus. It feels like a leap from "good" to "heavens above" when it's actually gone from "crap" to "good" - and we hadn't realized that our baseline was crap. So there's no electro-magical awakening, it's just about the arrival of fuck-givers.


"Mmmm!" is thousands, or millions, of times better than "Meh".

Personality Cults and True Believers

Rebels without causes are easily attracted to personality cults. They slip easily into the comfort of a kindred mob's nonspecific fury, claiming no lofty ideals beyond a vague notion of an empty image of an aloof figure upon whom they project their hazily bilious aspirations.


If you've never read "The True Believer", it's a beautifully-written short book that (along with Barbara Tuchman's "The March of Folly") is required reading for our era.

Everyone knows the term coined by its title, and the book was once considered an essential classic, but its decline into obscurity paralleled our own critical decline. We should never have lost touch with the key principles therein.

Creepy Heinlein, Creepy Kubrick

I’ve finally gotten around to reading Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange World". It reminds me very much of Kubrick’s "Eyes Wide Shut" in that I find myself squirming uncomfortably as I'm exposed (and exposed...and exposed) to the embarrassingly moldy and phenomenally unsexy sexual fantasies of some guy from a bygone era who I otherwise respect very much.

It's like hearing your parents disclose their boudoir secrets. Way, way too much information.

The Snark Fallacy

If you want to understand the world, recognize this extremely common cognitive error, which I'll call The Snark Fallacy:

"Spotting other people's flaws proves my superiority."

Another version: "Catching you being stupid makes me smart."

If you watch for it, it's everywhere. It underlies every judgmental person, and humans are incredibly judgmental. It's the mental tic that gives rise to The Dunning Kruger Effect. And it's strange that this mistake is so widespread, given such clear evidence to the contrary. Consider:

1. Every slightly bright 14 year old is a leading expert on flaw spotting. Yet scant few are genuinely superior.

2. The most intelligent and accomplished people (if they're emotionally healthy) tend to be non-superior and non-judgmental. They spot your stupidity, yes, but they spot their own, too....and realize that we're all mixed bags.


Read "A Confederacy of Dunces"!

The Italians and the New Spaniards

I raved about The New Spaniards, by John Hooper on Chowhound's suggested reading page:

After having visited the land of paella 19 times, I find that Hooper is dead-on perfect in all his observations and assessments of post-Franco Spain. He masterfully explains how the country reached its present point, fitting a surprising amount of historic/cultural background into 470 pages. Hooper offers methodical analysis of every imaginable mileau (art, education, politics, crime, sex, religion, the press,etc etc), plus evocative (and unerring) portraits of each of Spain's strikingly different states. Indispensible for those traveling there, and a fascinating read for anyone even mildly interested in the region.

It's such a great read, with no padding or flabby indulgence. Hooper was the Spain correspondent for The Economist, so he knows how to write with elegance and concision. And I just discovered Hooper was reassigned to Italy a few years ago, and has given them that country treatment, with "The Italians". If you have any curiosity, and want quick sketches of the regions and level-headed recent history, check it out. If you ever travel there, it's surely indispensable.

NY Times review of "The Italians"
Guardian review of "The Italians"

Another cool-sounding book on Italy recommended in the Guardian review (above): Tobias Jones' "The Dark Heart of Italy"

Why Fruits and Veggies Are So Crazy Cheap in Chinatown

Great recent Wall Street Journal article: "Why Fruits and Veggies Are So Crazy Cheap in Chinatown" (if that link doesn't show you the full article, try the first search result here). It's about a book titled "From Farm to Canal Street: Chinatown's Alternative Food Network in the Global Marketplace", by Valerie Imbruce, and it's a fascinating story, a must-read.

If this spurs you to do some shopping, consider buying "A Cook's Guide to Chinese Vegetables" by Martha Dahlen, which you can buy in e-format so it's always handy, either from Amazon Kindle or Apple iBooks (which has it for a dollar cheaper, plus it seems to be a more recent edition).

As for actual where-to-shop tips, Here's a swell annotated list of Chinatown markets by a Chinese woman who lives in the nabe (here are her other lists, many of which are great, though all pretty old). And in the WSJ article, Ms. Imbruce recommends "the 40-foot sidewalk fruit stand on Mulberry Street just south of Canal Street, and the vegetable stores on Mott between Grand and Hester streets." The article notes that "some of the best bargains can be found on day-old produce, at the sidewalk stands on Forsyth Street in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge. Here, $8 buys a 20-pound box of mangos."

We're Outstripping Our Own Sci-Fi Future

2015 not only sounds super-futuristic, it actually demonstrably is. We're outstripping our own science fiction future.

We've passed the futures depicted in Clockwork Orange (set in 1995), Escape From New York (1997), Stranger In A Strange Land (late 1990's) and Silent Running (2008). And, of course, 1984 and 2001 are long gone (in fact, 1984's as distant from us as 1953 was in 1984).

We'll soon overtake Logan’s Run (2016), Blade Runner (2019), and Soylent Green (2022).

Still, a few futuristic classics remain in our future. We're not even halfway through the timeline of Asimov's I, Robot stories (1998 through 2052), and The Terminator (2029), Fahrenheit 451 (circa 2053), Minority Report (2054), Alien (2122), The Matrix (2199), Brave New World (2540), and Dune (20,000 years in the future) remain on our distant horizon.

Alarmingly, I wasn't able to establish exactly when we need to start worrying about those damned apes taking over. So be safe out there.

"The Witch Next Door"

There's a question I've frequently returned to over the years here in Slogland (and which is particularly timely given divided reaction to this week's release of the torture reports):

"Will we human beings ever learn to react to extremism with enlightened moderation rather than with reciprocal extremism?"

One of the more elegant answers can be found in one of my favorite books - a thin little kid's title called "The Witch Next Door". A witch (a real one, with wand and everything) moves into a new house, the neighbors go berserk, and the witch, rather than responding to hatred with reciprocal hatred (Homo sapiens' signature move), well....she opts for a different route.

It's a beautiful parable, conveyed with great subtlety and economy and strewn with easter eggs (e.g. the posture of the witch - easy to miss - after she takes action against the neighbors) for the enjoyment of readers who give the book the serious study it deserves.

I was actually in my 20s when I first read "The Witch Next Door", and I've since bought copies for countless children and adults. It hasn't helped, though. The virus of reciprocal extremism is way too prevalent for one beautiful little book to offer sufficient inoculation.

Author Norman Bridwell (more famous for the "Clifford the Big Red Dog" series), alas, died this week.

"The Poor"

In my previous entry, I made frequent reference to "the poor". And that's a term I actually hate (I just didn't have any other way to phrase it!). I think it's a false construct saddled with wrong assumptions.

Growing up as a sheltered middle-class suburbanite, the word summoned visions of grimy unpleasant unhappiness. "The Poor" was a vaguely-understood scary "Other". But then, as I gained life experience, I noticed a few things:

1. "Poor" is relative
It doesn't matter how much money you have; browse real estate prices in Manhattan. Or contemplate sending kids to college without loans...or paying for business class, to avoid the indignities of coach. Even if you can somehow afford such things, they will not feel smoothly, affably attainable.

Those aren't Mr. Howell-isms ("Butlers are nearly unaffordable these days!"). Some people truly need to live in Manhattan, e.g. for work. Or have kids who can't afford loans. Or have long legs. So even "rich" people get the same trembly stomach I once felt when forced to take a toll bridge, replace a failing appliance, or pay for antibiotics. And, in keeping with the relativism, bear in mind that there are millions who'd take even those trifling last three as loathsomely Mr. Howell-ish ("la-di-da, such a burden for you to buck up for fancy medicine while my malnourished children and I fend off tsetse flies!").

The adjective "poorer" has meaning. The noun form "poor", much less so. Money limitations scale infinitely up and down. There's no point at which they're transcended. "Poor" is wherever your head bumps the bar.

2. You are in the 1%...globally
The poorest American is unthinkably rich compared to 99% of historic humanity. Consider these questions: How many of your siblings died due to lack of medical care? How much taller would you be if you hadn't been malnourished as a child? Do you have sufficient free time to get depressed or neurotic? Will you perform back-breaking labor til the day you die?

When an American feels poor - i.e. fosters resentment toward those with even bigger apartments and even nicer cars - billions scoff.

3. Less Stuff Doesn't Make You Less Happy
I was taught (by everything from Dickens novels to Jimmy Breslin) to envision The Poor as miserable. But after spending time in the Third World (and some sketchy portions of the First World), I've learned that's completely wrong. Here's how the mistake comes about:

Americans equate pain with suffering. We do so because pain is so unfamiliar to us that we can't help but respond with anguish. People with real problems learn to draw subtler distinctions. They can endure painful circumstance without triggering an adolescent grimace because they never expected everything to go just so in the first place. As a result, they display qualities seldom seen in America, like equanimity and empathy. It's easier to dance and love with a full heart when you're not stuck in your head nursing neurotic fixations re: the various peas lurking beneath your mattresses. An essential truth is understood: that happiness stems from wanting what you get, rather than getting what you want.

If you don't believe it, read a fantastic book by a writer who spent years visiting small, third world villages and discovering that such places, with little material bounty, appear to be the only places where humans feel - and act - fully human: "A World of Villages", by Brian M. Schwartz, is available used from Amazon.com for next to nothing. It would have been a best-seller if the book market wasn't glutted at the time of its publication with titles (none as profound or as readable) from backpacking world travelers.

Or, just as effective: start watching people who are wealthier than you (in real life, not in movies), and try to gauge how many seem happier than you. That's a gigantic "tell", yet one of the most oft-missed truisms of the human experience.

Free Textbook on Economic Analysis

It's over my head, so I can't really judge, but a brilliant fellow named R Preston Mcaffee went to the trouble of authoring a textbook on economic analysis, and has given it away for free over the Internet. Here's one of several articles about it.

If you're at all into this sort of thing, I have a hunch it will make you pretty happy.

"The Better Angels of Our Nature"

I'm told that everyone should read Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined". I would, myself, if I didn't read so ploddingly slowly that it'd take forever to get through 832 pages.

The book's very hotly debated, though even its detractors find it brilliant. Having gotten the sense this may come to be considered a classic, I'm currently flitting around it: reading reviews, interviews, and sample chapters, and generally trying to work up the zeal to tackle the thing.

Here's Pinker doing a Cliff's Note's version (plus Q&A).

BBC interview with author Steven Pinker (also see the insightful reader commentary on that page)

Raving NY Times review ("The Better Angels of Our Nature is a supremely important book")

A famously critical review by Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker (you must be a subscriber to view it). Here is Pinker's reply to that review (scroll down to "Other Questions").

Read quoted passages from the New Yorker review in this interesting survey of Pinker along with other recent "Big Idea" books, of which the writer is understandably skeptical:

"The history of publishing is replete with big ideas — see Francis Fukuyama’s end of history or Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations — that haven’t quite panned out. (China shows no sign of withering away without democracy, for example.) But as grand Theories of Everything arrive fast and thick, a growing skepticism of such unifying ideas has also emerged."

Yes, there's a very long list of these, going back centuries. And, yes, from "Capital" to "The Population Bomb" to "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind", regardless of the brilliance of the minds which spawned them, Big Ideas books most often turn out to be considered overreaching displays of intellectual hubris. But they're fun, they're provocative, and they keep us thinking. Which is good enough!

Here's an impressive Amazon reader review, as well as the interesting (and only sporadically flamey) three page discussion it spawned.

Finally, for a 98 minute super-entertaining theatrical treatment of similar themes, don't miss David Cronenberg's "A History of Violence" (2005). Quoting Roger Ebert's review:

"David Cronenberg says his title "A History of Violence" has three levels: It refers (1) to a suspect with a long history of violence; (2) to the historical use of violence as a means of settling disputes, and (3) to the innate violence of Darwinian evolution, in which better-adapted organisms replace those less able to cope."

I share Cronenberg's thinking. It strikes me as obvious that evolution favors the most violently competitive (which explains why there aren't indications of intelligent life in the universe). That said, a subtle evolutionary process does work the other way. Actions such as surrender, forgiveness, acceptance, and love all trigger an unmistakeable spritz of bliss. There is, for some reason, an innate biological reward mechanism encouraging those things; and myriad spiritual traditions insist that, in the very long run, this will win out over coarser, crueler impulses which, truly, provide a rather shoddier high.

Just so long as we don't blow ourselves up first.

What Do Publishers Wreck All Day?

In a previous entry, I linked to the children's classic "What Do People Do All Day?" by Richard Scarry. Did you know the edition currently published is 64 pages, a huge abridgement from the original 96 pages?


Tons of great stuff been cut. I understand the following are all gone: Building a House, Posting a Letter, Bread And How It Is Made, Huckle's Plane Trip, Sgt. Murphy the Busytown Policeman. And more. It's just awful!


You can still find the unabridged version used, but it will set you back at least $75!!

If you own an old copy in good condition, you may want to consider selling it so new kids can enjoy it (and you can go eat a fancy dinner with the profits)!

Donald: The Book About Rumsfeld Being Kidnapped and Heavily Interrogated

"Donald, a novel by Eric Martin and Stephen Elliott, comes out today (the same day real-life Rumsfeld's memoir is released) . I'm ordering it just from the blurb...though I could just as easily wait for the inevitable film adaptation:

As America’s most infamous former Secretary of Defense lies poised to unleash his wistful recollections and rewriting of the war on terror, authors Eric Martin and Stephen Elliott humbly submit their take to the historical record: Donald.

What would happen if Donald Rumsfeld, former defense secretary and architect of the war on terror, was abducted at night from his Maryland home, held without charges in his own prison system, denied a trial, and kept in a place where no one could find him, beyond the reach of the law? Donald is a high-wire allegory that answers this question, in equal parts breakneck thriller and gradual descent into madness. But it is also a novel rooted in the harrowing stories of real people caught in America’s military campaigns. And while there are those who would try to convince us that war is full of uncertainty—of knowns and unknowns—Donald reminds us that there remain things we know to be wrong.

Real Publishing is Vanity Publishing, Vanity Publishing is Real Publishing

Here is the deepest, darkest secret of the book publishing business: it's the true vanity press.

Let me explain. The vast majority of books are unprofitable. And authors make pennies on each sales dollar even under the best of circumstances (yes, they're paid advances on earnings, but most are puny). And, what's more, authors are expected to do their own marketing. The publisher's PR department might book you on a few piddling radio shows and book signings, but those will not do much. Unless you're a Stephen King, you will be expected to go forth and guerilla market. Like local musicians playing a club gig, you're unlikely to be invited back unless you fill the venue with friends and family willing to pay. So you do the writing and you do the selling, and you receive only pennies on the dollar out of the sales.

Why do it? To be able to say that you're published and to have the thrill of seeing your book "out there". Yup, pure vanity!

If you lack a Stephen King-sized following, and you're writing for a living, rather than from ego, and you do possess the sales chops the publishing companies hope you have, the shrewd biz route is self-publishing (especially now that "publish on demand" technology has made it cheap to print very small runs on short notice), where you do the same work and keep vastly more of the profits. You do not, however, enjoy the ego boost of a fancy publishing contract.

Ironically, they call this vanity publishing!

Whenever I explain this to people unfamiliar with the business, they're inevitably certain I'm oversimplifying or exaggerating. But I'm not. The publishing business is about two things: 1. printing money from sales of star authors, and 2. flattering vain wannabes into working nearly free to fill out the catalog. The category 2 authors imagine themselves to be in a third category: unknown-yet-clearly-destined-for-grandeur. And their fantasies are dutifully indulged. As they write and market, in exchange for an infinitesimal fraction of highly unlikely profits, they are granted all the shiny deferences of that fabled third category. This, obviously, is the "flattery" part!

(I should note that I'm speaking from a position of objectivity, rather than defeated bitterness. I've experienced this from both sides, having lost $4000 on my first book, never receiving a dime of royalties though it's been in print over a decade, but also, among other publishing ventures, kept Chowhound running for two solid years on the advance from a multi-book contract with Penguin.)