First there was a great commercial for the Discovery Channel.
Then there was “xkcd Loves the Discovery Channel.”
Then there was the animated adaptation of that xkcd strip.
Now this:
Full credits here.
You know something, being sick for nearly five weeks isn’t nearly as much fun as they say.
Much better now, thanks to high-tech prescription drugs that appear to have successfully interrupted the cough/asthma/allergy cycle that had me unable to do much more challenging in the month of January than watch old House episodes. As of the last few days, I’ve even been back in the Tor offices, accomplishing actual work.
But if you’re wondering why I’ve been even more unresponsive than usual, that’s probably why. At this point I need to do something like proclaim “email amnesty,” or maybe “email apocalypse.” Or at least do this, an approach that seems applicable to non-email inboxes as well.
I’ve been seeing a lot of confusion about the “agency model” for publishing ebooks, which is what Macmillan, Hachette, HarperCollins, and Apple are on record as preferring to Amazon and its Kindle program. Please understand that I am not speaking on behalf of Macmillan or any of its subsidiaries, and I don’t have any inside information on what exactly John Sargent had in mind this past week when he wrote his statements.
Anyway.
Under the agency model, online retailers will sell a publisher’s ebooks in return for 30% of the gross. It’s not tied to a specific price structure or publication schedule. Publishers will set their own prices for the titles they publish, and decide when their own editions will come out.
The model isn’t newly hatched. Tom Doherty* came up with something like it a few years ago. (I distinctly recall him saying “We are not going to license ourselves out of our own business,” and hearing from Patrick not long after that that Tom had decided that online ebooksellers were distributors, not publishers.)
At the heart of the model is the proposition that ebooks aren’t essentially different from hardcopy books. Ebooks are just another repro technology.* Furthermore, online ebook sellers like Amazon aren’t publishers; they’re distributors or booksellers.*
The difference between the agency model and Amazon’s plan for world domination is that Amazon wants to license* the ebooks in its Kindle program, control their content, and set their prices. That is: it wants to be the publisher, not a distributor or seller. This might be doable if Amazon were out there negotiating to buy rights at market prices. It isn’t. Amazon expects to have the rights just handed over, as though it were doing the conventional publishers a favor.
Amazon also wants to have the Kindle edition go on sale at the same time as the hardcover, and it wants to set a single price for the Kindle edition that undercuts the new hardcovers like crazy. This is a major problem. The revenue from hot new hardcovers is what keeps most conventional publishers afloat. It enables them to buy odd books and small books and first novels, and to put real effort into editing and packaging and promoting their books, and to pursue long-term projects like developing their authors’ careers.
In the long run, the Amazon model turns publishers into unfunded R&D labs that are obliged to turn over everything they develop to other companies at rock-bottom prices. It isn’t viable, and it’s not author-friendly in six different ways. Have you ever seen a discussion of how badly messed-up Kindle texts are? Amazon’s business isn’t about books and authors; it’s about selling units at a discount.
I like the agency model. Publishers keep doing what publishers do well. Online retailers step into something very like the role of the bookseller. Market forces continue to exert themselves in normal ways. And after decades of theories and models and way too much discussion, the ebook settles into being what it always should have been: just another repro technology, with its own strengths and weaknesses and price points.
The agency model is a good illustration of how publishing can constantly be going through (supposedly) cataclysmic changes while continuing to putter along as a recognizable entity. The specific mechanisms and technologies change, but they’re assimilated into existing roles, relationships, and areas of competence and responsibility. It’s not unlike the way the military turned cavalry into mechanized units in the first part of the 20th century: tech changes faster than the roles of the people who use it.*
From that standpoint, the agency model is a suitable and fitting development:
I haven’t met Blake Charlton or read his novel, Spellwright, but everyone I know who’s met him says he’s a very nice guy. Everyone I know who’s read his book—it’s about a student wizard who’s working in a spell-based magical system, only he’s dyslexic—says it’s charming, even the ones who don’t normally like fantasy.
Spellwright is his first novel. He’s written it in his copious spare time as a medical student at Stanford. Its official release date is less than a month from now. This is how he’s come to write What Happens to a Debut Author’s Brain on #Amazonfail.
He’s not alone. There are first-time authors published by Macmillan whose books came out last week. There are authors whose first novels were published last month, and were just starting to get word-of-mouth sales traction. And so forth. And so on. They have nothing to do with the fight over ebook prices, but Amazon is screwing them over just the same.
Macmillan author and former record company exec Susan Pivar has a brilliant piece at HuffPo, The Macmillan vs. Amazon Throwdown, about the significance of sales and distribution structures, the perils of letting retailers control prices, and how, starting in the 90s, their mishandling of the issue “led the music business to unwittingly fall on its pony-tailed sword.” Her analysis goes far beyond Amazon’s grab for lebensraum and other issues of the moment. I suspect people will be reading and quoting it for years to come.
Among other things it’s the first explanation I’ve seen that accounts for a big difference between the recorded music industry and trade book publishing. The music industry promotes and releases a relatively small number of albums, which it expects to sell in vast numbers. The trade book industry publishes a vast number of titles, of which a tiny fraction are bestsellers, a small fraction are modestly profitable, and the rest either lose money or come darn close to it. I mostly understand why we do what we do, but I’ve always wondered why the music industry took the other path.
I’ll try not to quote her entire essay:
…How did the American public get hoodwinked into believing that the suppliers are the bullies rather than the retailers?Yeah. Bullies that are into self-pity feel justified no matter how badly they’re behaving. It’s also been creepy watching days pass without Amazon re-listing the books. I’m increasingly wondering whether the whole point of their “capitulation” announcement was to kill the story in the mainstream media.As an ex-music business exec (1989-2000), I’ve already seen how the story ends when an industry allows retailers (rather than suppliers) to set product pricing. Recording companies waited around for someone else to take the hit by telling Best Buy or Walmart to stuff their “loss-leader” strategies and outrageous price and position fees. But no one did. Kudos to Macmillan’s John Sargent for his bold gesture. And shame on Amazon for calling the move to accept Macmillan’s pricing (for now) a capitulation. That word really gave me the creeps. …
Here is one woman’s blow-by-blow view of how we got to a place where retailers control basically everything about how a book reaches your hand. (Social media phenoms notwithstanding.)That represents a huge loss of expertise in the overall system. Local stores knew their territory and their customers, and had diverse but well-informed tastes. That is: they had superior resolution when it came to answering a basic question: “Are there people out there who (a.) buy records and (b.) will really like this recording? And if so, who are they, and how do I sell it to them?”Shift in purchasing patterns from regional to national. In the 90s, there were things called record stores. They sold recordings. There were things called appliance stores. They sold appliances. There were things called grocery stores. They sold food. Somewhere in the early 90s these things started to get all mixed together. When it became apparent that the CD was for real and not only were people going to buy new releases in this format but also replace every single thing they already owned, the industry kaboomed. In a good way. Suddenly every retailer wanted to stock CDs. (I’ll never forget the time Rounder Records (my employer at the time) got a 3000-piece bluegrass catalog order from Blockbuster video stores.)
Around the same time, we saw the rise of big box stores selling music. The famous phrase “loss leader” came into our lexicon. CDs became those inglorious leaders. They were imagined to be just the thing to lure unsuspecting customers into the big box with the hope, I suppose, that they’d realize they needed a new washing machine while shopping for Nirvana’s Nevermind, or perhaps the other way around. To capture market share, Best Buy, Circuit City, and others priced music below even wholesale costs in some cases. What knucklehead thought of this, I have no idea, but this was the beginning of the end. Suddenly regular record stores had to compete on price in order to survive. But they couldn’t achieve the economies of scale, so instead they ate each other. 20-store chains became 100 store chains. 100-store chains became 800-store chains. Independent stores began to die. First individual stores and then small chains.
So what, you might think, it’s the American way to compete on price and anyway bands were still making music, so what’s the big deal. The big deal is that purchasing became centralized. This had two important consequences:Context matters. Developing new artists requires a long-term commitment to their work and readership, and close attention to their sales patterns. You can’t do that if every new release has to be a blockbuster. It’s like expecting children to pay the entire cost of their education.One, regional bands or labels couldn’t sell records to a buyer in their own hometown, thereby building a local base, and, drum roll please,
Two, Central buying can only succeed with hit-driven product. When one guy in an office in Albany is deciding what’s going to go in 1200 stores throughout the country, he can’t buy this for Miami and that for Ann Arbor. He doesn’t have time to buy 500 copies of a new release this week and then monitor sales patterns and buy another 500 (or 10 or 1000) the next week and then keep 2 copies in the bin just in case someone wants to buy it in a year. Too labor intensive. Plus he has no idea what people care about in Miami or Ann Arbor. He needs quick turns on music that’s going to blow up out of the box and then be gone. For good.
Buh-bye developing artists.
As I said on Boing Boing right after the story broke:
If you strip away the industry’s margins, you lose the things the industry can do.…while a fixed $10 price point would undoubtedly be good for Amazon’s ebook business, it would take a shark-sized bite out of the market for hot new bestsellers, which is trade book publishing’s single most profitable area.That revenue source is what keeps a lot of publishing companies afloat. It provides the liquidity that enables them to buy and publish smaller and less commercially secure titles: odd books, books by unknown writers, books with limited but enthusiastic audiences, et cetera.
My honest estimate is that the result would be fewer and less diverse titles overall, published less well than they are now.
Nationalization of music distribution. Central purchasing systems do not thrive on having a multitude of vendors, each with different terms, sales cycles, pricing structures, and styles of customer service. They want to buy a bunch of stuff from as few people as possible. Distributors had to figure out a way to do business with retail behemoths. They had to become behemoths themselves. Major labels actually began scouting indie labels and offering distribution deals to the bigger ones. Smaller indie distributors and one-stops began gluing themselves together to form national distribution companies. Though they were once the bastion of new music, indie labels and distributors had less and less time for developing artists themselves.(Snipped: interesting history of the Telecommunications Act and its effects.)Buh-bye regional music.
Nationalization of radio.
… Local radio lost its local-ness and all the pride, quirkiness, and opportunity for new artists and creative programming that went with it. Again, a few people making decisions for a huge number of outlets. And, again, only hits serve an infrastructure like this.Here’s the paragraph I think should be carved in granite and inlaid in gold:Buh-bye new music.
Shift in creative locus. Hits, hits, hits. Have I made my point? Instead of a record label being able to survive by selling a few copies of a zillion different recordings, they had to sell a zillion copies of a few recordings. Product lines became less and less diverse, less and less risk-taking. What can sell a zillion copies without artist development? Only already-established artists or those lucky few who a label would choose to get behind and push, push, push until they made it to the top (as long as it happened within the first month after the record came out). To do this would literally require millions of dollars. To spend millions of dollars, you have to have a sure thing. To have a sure thing, you look at what has already succeeded and try to copy it by going out and finding an act that fits the bill. When you copy others, you end up with bullshit.I know this problem from other places. It’s why major entertainment franchises won’t allow character change or worldbuilding in tie-in storylines: you can’t let the creatives mess around with a narrative franchise worth millions and millions of dollars. It’s why you can’t take your artistic guidance solely from polling the fans: all they know is what they liked last time. It’s why it’s perilous to do editorial work on material with which you have no personal sympathy: if you’re making choices based on what thus-and-such market segment “ought to like,” you run the risk of choosing stuff that no one loves at all. Hell, it’s the single biggest reason acquiring editors are hesitant to get too specific about what they want: aspiring authors will write to fit that description, rather than satisfying their own sense of what’s cool/fun/interesting/worth reading.
(And no, self-publishing is not the answer.)
Have you had the experience over the last decade of checking out the paperback wire racks at your local grocery, or a small airport newsstand, or the sundries store at a highway rest area, and found they were full of famous-author bestsellers, none of which you wanted to read? That state of affairs is the result of the same kind of processes Susan Pivar describes in music. Big-box retailers insisted on simplified purchasing deals with a small number of distributors, and while they were at it they gouged themselves out a bigger wholesale discount.
This triggered the collapse of the previous system of distribution, with its hundreds of regional distributors with all their accumulated expertise, to one where the handful of distributors left standing manage an impoverished system of huge territories with which they’re imperfectly acquainted. That’s why you see those wire racks, which used to have a diverse selection of books, stocked entirely with books by a small number of big-name authors, one vertical row per author. It’s called “famous author racking.” Publishers have run sales demos at selected airport newsstands, showing that a more diverse selection will sell significantly more books, but the distributors weren’t interested. Famous author racking is simple, it’s easy, and the distributors already have as much work to do as they can handle and their resources will allow.
Yay, retailers. We love the retailers. Commerce wouldn’t work without them. But if you let a few big retailers dictate your prices, next thing you know you’re going to be bidding to be allowed to supply them with wholesale merchandise at sweatshop rates so they can drive their remaining competition out of business by undercutting them. That’s bad if you’re making t-shirts. It’s disastrous if you’re making books or music.
It’s particularly disastrous if you care about having access to a wide range of well-made new art. Authors may grumble about publishers (and musicians certainly grumble about record companies), but when they’re not being forced into dysfunctional arrangements, publishing houses are companies whose job it is to find, nurture, shape, package, and sell good books to people who want to read them. When we do it well, we make a world where there are more books, and better books. Authors get paid more to write them, and can afford to put more love and effort into them, and more writers can afford to be authors. We co-enable good bookstores and booksellers. We package books so that they speak to you, telling you what kind of reading experience they are, and letting you decide whether that’s what you want.
If you want good art, you have to pay for good art. You also need a delivery system that connects that art with its audience. And you need for the money paid for that art to go to the people who make it. Macmillan’s fight with Amazon isn’t a meaningless corporate squabble over a few percents profit. It damned well matters.
Novelist Cat Valente addresses the idea that in the glorious, friction-free digital utopia of the future, all writers will electronically self-publish:
Funny thing is, if this future came to pass and the market were nothing but self-published autonomous authors either writing without editorial or paying out of pocket for it, if we were flooded with good product mixed with bad like gold in a stream, it would be about five seconds before someone came along and said: hey, what if I started a company where we took on all the risk, hired an editorial staff and a marketing staff to make the product better and get it noticed, and paid the author some money up front and a percentage of the profits in exchange for taking on the risk and the initial cost? So writers could, you know, just write?And writers would line up at their door.
Remember Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the “underwear bomber”?
Remember how a Rasmussen poll concluded that 58% of US voters favored waterboarding him, while the conservative media staggered toward its collective fainting couch at the idea of reading him his Miranda rights?
Well, according to an article on Reuters today, he’s been providing “useful, actionable intelligence” in the time since he was Mirandized. Know how we got that intelligence? Rather than disappearing him in some gulag or subjecting him to “enhanced interrogation”, it appears that US officials have treated his injuries and “brought family members from Nigeria to help convince him” to talk.
So now we have information about developing threats in Yemen, more reliable information than we would have had by torturing the guy.
And it’s not fruit of the poison tree, so it’s admissible evidence in court (perhaps not open court, depending on security issues). This means we can put Abdulmutallab on trial like any other person accused of a crime. (Which, interestingly, means he is more likely to be convicted and, if so, given a serious sentence than if he went before a military commission.)
I think this is a good thing for us. I believe that by holding a criminal trial, by looking into his face, hearing what he has to say and the case against him, we’ll learn more about the threats that face us than we have from years of whispering our fears in the dark. And if he’s found guilty, we can then sentence him according to our tradition of law, which is older and stronger and wiser than at least 58% of us have shown ourselves to be.
And the next time someone is concerned that a son, a brother, or a friend is planning an attack, it will be that much easier to step forward, because we treat accused people decently. No matter what our enemies say.
There’s plenty I’m not happy about with the Obama administration right at the present moment. I want health care reform so bad it aches. But this would never have happened under a Bush presidency*, or a McCain one. We’re doing the right thing here, the intelligent thing, and it’s important that we stand up and say it.
* I stand corrected. Where were the fainting couches then?
On Friday, Amazon removed the “buy” links on its site from every book published by Macmillan or its subsidiaries. The two companies were in the middle of negotiations about ebook rights and pricing, and Amazon got tired of negotiating, so they de-listed Macmillan’s books to force them to capitulate.
I opine that Amazon’s demands were overblown and excessively self-serving, and their attempt to strongarm Macmillan put them in clear violation of federal antitrust regulations. I observe that Amazon has pulled this same trick on several previous occasions, and gotten away with it more often than not. Those victories had nothing to do with laws and rights, and everything to do with the power distributors hold over publishers.
The book production pipeline is long and expensive. If a major distributor suspends sales of a publisher’s books, there’s a good chance the publisher will go broke and go out of business before they can do anything about the situation.
It’s been an exciting weekend.
Today, Amazon backed down and said they’d decided not to invade Belgium after all. It’s good news, though I’m still waiting to hear they’ve actually put the links back up. In the meantime, some selected readings:
From Zinc Blinked, by Scott Westerfeld:
This is not a case of two corporations pissing down on us mere mortals with equal disdain; it’s a case of complex negotiations in an ancient industry with many arcane traditions that’s in a state of technological flux, being conducted at a level which the overwhelming majority of readers do not understand (nor should they have to), and which were going along in a way that made, frankly, perfect sense to those of us who understand this industry a little, when suddenly, out of the blue, one of the sides in this negotiation spat their pacifier across the room in a very public and embarrassing display of petulance. And that corporation was Amazon.From the formidable Amazon, Macmillan: an outsider’s guide to the fight, by Charlie Stross:
Note that Amazon have been trying to grab a larger share of the cake by dipping into the publishers’ — and the authors’ — share of what meagre profits there are (book publishing is notoriously, uniquely unprofitable, within the media world), even though they’ve already got the wholesale and retail supply chains stitched up. Their buy wholesale/sell retail model screws publishers’ ability to manage their cash flow and tends to induce price wars on the supply side, which is okay if we’re talking widgets with a range of competing suppliers, but books are individually unique products and the industry already runs on alarmingly narrow margins: this isn’t the music or movie biz. …John Scalzi has been on top of this story all weekend, starting with Macmillan Books Gone Missing from Amazon, and continuing on with A Quick Note on eBook Pricing and Amazon Hijinx, It’s All About Timing, and Dear Amazon. His most recent entry, All the Many Ways Amazon So Very Failed This Weekend, is gratifyingly thorough:Just before Apple announced the iPad and the agency deal for ebooks, Amazon pre-empted by announcing an option for publishing ebooks in which they would graciously reduce their cut from 70% to 30%, “same as Apple”. From a distance this looks competitive, but the devil is in the small print; to get the 30% rate, you have to agree that Amazon is a publisher, license your rights to Amazon to publish through the Kindle platform, guarantee that you will not allow other ebook editions to sell for less than the Kindle price, and let Amazon set that price, with a ceiling of $9.99. In other words, Amazon choose how much to pay you, while using your books to undercut any possible rivals (including the paper editions you still sell). It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the major publishers don’t think very highly of this offer.
Leaving aside the moral, philosophical, cultural and financial implications of this weekend’s Amazon/Macmillan slapfight and What It All Means for book readers and the future of the publishing industry, in one very real sense the whole thing was an exercise in public communications, a process by which two very large companies made a case for themselves in the public arena. And in this respect, we can say this much without qualification: oh, sweet Jesus, did Amazon ever hump the bunk.For further discussion, check out the comment thread of the preceding entry on Making Light.How did it do so? I’m glad you asked! Let us count the ways. …
2. Amazon Lost the Authors.
Amazon apparently forgot that when it moved against Macmillan, it also moved against Macmillan’s authors. Macmillan may be a faceless, soulless baby-consuming corporate entity with no feelings or emotions, but authors have both of those, and are also twitchy neurotic messes who obsess about their sales, a fact which Amazon should be well aware of because we check our Amazon numbers four hundred times a day, and a one-star Amazon review causes us to crush up six Zoloft and snort them into our nasal cavities, because waiting for the pills to digest would just take too long.These are the people Amazon pissed off. Which was not smart thing, because as we all know, the salient feature of writers is that they write. And they did, about this, all weekend long.
Addenda:
From Tobias Buckell, Why My Books Are No Longer Available on Amazon.com.
From the New York Times’ “Bits” blog: Amazon Pulls Macmillan Books Over E-book Price Disagreement.
Tor is part of Macmillan, but I have no more idea what’s actually going on than you do. And yes, I’m not thrilled with that fact.
UPDATE: John Scalzi making tons of sense. Also, TNH weighs in.
FURTHER UPDATE: CEO John Sargent has issued a statement.
I don’t generally run around obsessing over whether everyone I purchase goods or services from agrees with me about everything. But famously-crackpot Whole Foods CEO John Mackey has now made himself sufficiently repellent that I very much doubt I’ll ever feel like spending a dime in one of his stores again. Not content with peddling rich-guy “libertarian” attacks on health-care reform, asserting that climate change is a fraud designed to “raise taxes and increase regulation, and in turn lower our standard of living and lead to an increase in poverty,” comparing unionization to herpes, and getting caught playing sockpuppet games on financial message boards, Mackey is now…charging his employees more for food if they fail to meet his arbitrarily-chosen cholesterol, blood pressure, and body-mass index criteria.
As Paul Campos points out, this isn’t just tinpot CEO paternalism; it’s also junk science:
In terms of BMI, the Whole Foods discounts correlate with increasing mortality risk. The most sophisticated study on this subject, published in 2005 in JAMA by Katherine Flegal et. al., used a BMI of 23-24.9 as its referent category for baseline risk of mortality. (This corresponds with the higher end of the government’s “normal/recommended” weight range of 18.5-24.9. The lower one goes in the “normal” weight range, the greater the mortality risk becomes, so using the top of the “normal” range as the referent category actually minimizes the risks associated with “normal” weight). It found 86,000 excess deaths per year in the United States associated with “normal” weight when compared to the mortality risk among people with BMIs in the 25-29.9 range.It’s entirely arguable that I should have been eschewing Whole Foods already. I buy stuff from other companies whose behavior annoys me, because life is too short to be constantly maintaining a boycott list ten miles long. Moreover, when WF first started opening stores in New York City a few years ago, the grocery scene throughout most of the five boroughs was dire. (For years TNH and I noted that whenever we got to shop in a big, well-appointed suburban grocery, our reactions tended to be much like those of émigrés from the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union: You have such many foods in your United States! And so fresh!) And jokes about “Whole Paycheck” notwithstanding, I’ve never minded paying a premium for groceries that are genuinely fresh, wholesome, and tasty—we find that when we have attractive and interesting supplies at home, we fall prey less to the temptation to eat out or order in. But more recently, high-quality NYC grocery alternatives have multiplied—alternatives run by people who evidently think that good unions make for good business.You’re reading that right: Whole Foods’ employee discounts based on weight are inversely related to mortality risk. So you have a policy that’s not merely discriminatory on its face, but completely irrational on its own terms.
(2) The highest employee discount has no floor, only a ceiling. In the Flegal study, underweight (BMI < 18.5) was associated with a stratospheric increase in mortality risk. (This remains true even when the data is controlled for smoking and pre-existing disease). But if you’re an underweight college student suffering from an eating disorder and working as a checker at the Boulder Whole Foods (not a hypothetical as anyone who has ever shopped there can attest) you get a 30% discount for maintaining the “healthiest” weight.
Ultimately, as Matthew Yglesias pointed out a while back:
[T]here’s asking a CEO to pander to your prejudices, and there’s pressuring a CEO not to go out of his way to offend your prejudices. Corporate executives have a lot of social and political power in the United States, in a way that goes above and beyond the social and political power that stems directly from their wealth. The opinions of businessmen on political issues are taken very seriously by the press and by politicians on both sides of the aisle. Once upon a time perhaps union leaders exercised the same kind of sway, but these days all Republicans, most of the media, and some Democrats feel comfortable writing labor off as just an “interest group” while Warren Buffett and Bill Gates and Jack Welch are treated as all-purpose sages. One could easily imagine a world in which CEOs were reluctant to play the role of freelance political pundit out of fear of alienating their customer base. And it seems to me that that might very well be a nice world to live in.At any rate, very few businesses go as far as Whole Foods in marketing their products specifically as part of a quasi-politicized left-wing lifestyle and few CEOs go as far as Mackey in public advocacy of political views that are only tangentially related to his business. If Whole Foods shareholders were to start to wonder whether having their corporate brand dragged into the health care debate is really a smart use of their assets, I would call that a good thing.
Kodak introduced its 135 line of film in 1934. It was the mainstay of journalists and hobbyists until the advent of good affordable digital cameras. Most people* who have taken their photography at all seriously have worked with it, including me.
When I was about sixteen, I suddenly discovered my parents’ darkroom1. I’d asked for, and got, a reasonable 35mm SLR camera for the previous Christmas (a Pentax ME Super; I have it still). I read a lot of photography magazines and shot a few rolls of slide film (all the rage at the time).
But one day I was in the basement looking for something or other, and remembered that my parents had said that space was light-tight and set up for developing and printing2. And as I moved all the junk off of the enlarger and found the rather elderly chemicals, I realized that I was fascinated by the idea of developing and printing my own pictures3. Absent some substantial investment, that meant black and white print film, so I abandoned slides and color. (Besides, this was going back to basics. Foundational learning. The heart of photography. I talked like that a lot.)
My parents4 handed me a beaten-up, chemical-stained copy of Horenstein’s Black and White Photography and left me to it.
For about six months, I did nothing else with my leisure time. I’d get a roll or two of film after school on a Friday, shoot pictures in the park on the Saturday, and spend the Sunday in the darkroom developing the previous day’s roll and printing the previous week’s negatives.
My mother said my photos looked like I’d just pointed the camera everywhere and taken pictures. I was (and am) obsessed with pattern and detail: the ways that trees grow and distribute their foliage, the shadow of a window screen on eggshells, the effect of strong side lighting on a single ornament. I struggled to get the camera and enlarger to reveal what I loved about the world.
And one day in the early autumn I realized that I was not Ansel Adams, and indeed had no idea who I was or wanted to be as a photographer. And so I piled the stuff back on the enlarger, left my bottles of developer and fixer and my boxes of paper where I’d found my parents’ old supplies, and locked the door again.
And because life does imitate the circular art of storytelling, my sister wandered into that small, dark space under the stairs fifteen years later, cleared all the junk off of the enlarger and dug out all the chemicals. She photographs people, and does beautiful, painful things with the camera that would never occur to me.
I got back into photography a few years ago, taking more detailed, patterned pictures on a digital cameraphone, but it was a mild dilettantism in comparison. There’s simply nothing like a teenaged darkroom obsession.
Last year’s Christmas edition of the British Medical Journal included the astonishing account of an auto-appendectomy in the Antarctic in 1961.
Apparently Leonid Rogozov, doctor to the the sixth Soviet Antarctic expedition, recognized in himself the symptoms of acute appendicitis. When other treatments failed, he briefed other members of the expedition on how to assist him and operated on himself. Read the article yourself, if you have, erm, the stomach for it. (It’s not graphic, not even the photos. Honest.)
I’d doubt it had it been published in another journal, or in April, or if one of the article coauthors were not his son. As it is, I’ve simply added another layer to my astonishment at what people can do when they have to.
Rogozov himself shrugged off his accomplishment, saying that it was simply “A job like any other, a life like any other.” That may be the neatest part of the whole story.
Jo Walton, at Tor.com, on how we read, or fail to read, science fiction:
My ex-husband once lent a friend Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War. The friend couldn’t get past chapter 2, because there was a tachyon drive mentioned, and the friend couldn’t figure out how that would work. All he wanted to talk about was the physics of tachyon drives, whereas we all know that the important thing about a tachyon drive is that it lets you go faster than light, and the important thing about the one in The Forever War is that the characters get relativistically out of sync with what’s happening on Earth because of it. The physics don’t matter—there are books about people doing physics and inventing things, and some of them are SF (The Dispossessed…) but The Forever War is about going away to fight aliens and coming back to find that home is alien, and the tachyon drive is absolutely essential to the story but the way it works—forget it, that’s not important.Lots more, all smart. Read the whole thing. Comments turned off here—go comment there!This tachyon drive guy, who has stuck in my mind for years and years, got hung up on that detail because he didn’t know how to take in what was and what wasn’t important. How do I know it wasn’t important? The way it was signalled in the story. How did I learn how to recognise that? By reading half a ton of SF. How did I read half a ton of SF before I knew how to do it? I was twelve years old and used to a lot of stuff going over my head, I picked it up as I went along. That’s how we all did it. Why couldn’t this guy do that? He could have, but it would have been work, not fun. […]
Because SF can’t take the world for granted, it’s had to develop techniques for doing it. There’s the simple infodump, which Neal Stephenson has raised to an artform in its own right. There are lots of forms of what I call incluing, scattering pieces of information seamlessly through the text to add up to a big picture. The reader has to remember them and connect them together. This is one of the things some people complain about as “too much hard work” and which I think is a high form of fun. SF is like a mystery where the world and the history of the world is what’s mysterious, and putting that all together in your mind is as interesting as the characters and the plot, if not more interesting.
(Generally, if you’re not reading Jo Walton’s posts on Tor.com, you’re missing some of the best practical SF criticism in years. This link gets you roughly the last couple of months’ worth, but she’s been posting at this rate pretty much since we launched the site a year and a half ago.)
Stopping by the Tilt’n Diner tonight on our way to Arisia, spotted a flyer pinned to the corkboard in the entryway:
Caboose for sale:There was a nice photo of a caboose in Boston and Maine colors, number C 127. It’s currently located at Northfield, New Hampshire.Northfield, New Hampshire
Fully contained.To see, or for more info, call Ron 603 286 4155 or 603 455 2659
Here are photos (not the one that was on the flyer) of C-127.
How often is it, when you get a model of your vehicle, you get a model of your vehicle?
Darned odd things you see on local cork boards.
I think about this every time I see a news story about the DHS/NTSA developing elaborate systems that test travelers for trace amounts of chemicals used in explosives.
How do you beat that? By seeding the travel environment with the target chemicals. For instance, you could sprinkle them into the upholstery and/or carpeting of buses, trains, and airport taxis. Travelers who came into contact with them would pick up trace amounts, which would set off the airport chemical detectors. A system that’s swamped with false positives is as blind as one that can’t detect what it’s looking for, and it’s a hell of a lot more nervous.
The beauty part about doing this is that it’s so easy. You don’t have to build a working bomb, learn to fly a plane, target a specific flight, buy a plane ticket, or pass through airport security. All you have to do is sit back and keep pressing the DHS/NTSA’s panic buttons.
Chemicals aren’t terrorism. Terrorism isn’t air travel. Terror is an effect. I don’t know anyone who was made more fearful by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab setting fire to his crotch. I know a lot of people who are afraid to travel because they’ve heard reports of abusive behavior by security personnel at borders and airports.
Next: figuring out how to put miniature cap pistols into coin-operated toy vending machines at highway rest areas near border checkpoints.
Not your usual images of our fighting men at work and play. Wish I’d found these earlier; they’re going away too soon. When you click on the links, scroll down to see the larger versions.
Close friends.
A couple of guys on the deck of the USS Idaho. It’s safe to say they like each other.
A couple more guys on deck.
Still more guys. Wish he’d identified them.
A sailor in grubby work clothes, in front of what I think is a signaling device.
Practicing fisticuffs.
A formally posed group.
An informally posed group.
Mugging for the camera.
More mugging for the camera.
On shore—at a guess, in Honolulu.
On shore, wearing a lei.
Touring the cane fields.
The past is another country. I may speculate about some aspects of it, but I can’t really know.
Allow me to recommend this NYT interview, in which one-time Tennessee congressman and would-be New York senatorial candidate Harold Ford Jr. reveals that he’s set foot in Staten Island once, when his helicopter landed there. He’s marginally familiar with one section of one subway line. He opposes Obama’s health care bill. He has a history of opposing gay marriage. He also has a history of supporting proposals to give local police the power to enforce immigration laws: a disastrous policy in a city where two-thirds of the residents are first- or second-generation immigrants.
His plan to encourage hiring is to slash corporate taxes and give employers a payroll tax holiday. He approves of the massive bonuses the bailed-out Wall Street banks paid a handful of their employees. And while it’s not surprising that he’s against capping executive compensation—it’s estimated that he’s getting paid at least a million a year—the rationale he gives is astounding:
“I am a capitalist,” he said. “I believe that people take risk, and there are rewards if they do well; they should lose if they don’t.”Uh-huh. Risk takers. Rewards for doing well.
So read the interview already. It’s a work of art.
Suggestions for further fun: Glenn Greenwald blasts Ford’s privileged status, and his twisted notions of what constitutes capitalism. Campaign Diaries dissects Ford’s missteps and flip-flopping policies. Huffington Post characterizes the interview as “the New York Times basically allowed Ford to stage his own political autoerotic asphyxiation.” Politico dishes. Brooklynbadboy at Daily Kos takes his turn at the piñata. And Ford’s hoped-for opponent, incumbent NY Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, says “Bring it on.”
I started coughing during the Christmas-through-New-Year’s break, and it got gradually worse; I’ve been home from work for nearly two weeks now.
I’ve seen doctors. No, it’s not H1N1. (Yes, I wondered.) It appears to be a viral lung infection made worse by allergies. I’m taking stuff and I tentatively think I’m on the mend. But if you’ve been wondering why I’ve been slow to get back to you, even by my usual lousy standards, that’s why.
On the bright side, it appears I’ll be going to Aussiecon 4 later this year. Cool. I’ve never been south of the Equator. Fluorospheric advice about things to do in and around Melbourne would be gratefully received. (It’ll only be me, not TNH, alas.)
From Smithsonian:
An Assyrian clay tablet dating to around 2800 B.C. bears the inscription: “Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching.”
All right, who did we loan our Firefly DVD set to? And can we get it back?
Feel free to use the thread to recall other strayed books, records, DVDs, and similar media.
