[contextly_auto_sidebar id="rsTsrc9iWZyWOtGEurvcdQNW78Mrk5Dy"] TODAY I have a new Salon post that quotes an Iggy Pop speech in the UK, and tries to make sense of it. Well into the age of streaming, we’re still hearing from a few musicians – most of them promoted and even employed by the tech sector – that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Some resent the new arrangement, where they … [Read more...]
Amazon and the New York Times
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="hcxWCofPNmshtu5V4mfeJWMEKeMUb4SZ"] I REMAIN a dedicated fan of the Gray Lady, but its recent pieces looking for some "good news" in the Amazon fight struck me as bit strange. Today I respond in a post for Salon. It begins this way: In the careful-what-you-wish-for department: A bit more than a week ago, the New York Times’ public editor, Margaret Sullivan, urged … [Read more...]
Is Amazon a Monopoly?
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="QUacYyetZUphAZnyUIQyaD8AKTam7LBQ"] THE battle over Amazon -- including the siege of Hachette -- has heated up lately, with The New Republic's Franklin Foer and several prominent authors, including Ursula Le Guin, calling the online bookseller "a monopoly." Foer has argued that it's time for the Department of Justice to break Amazon up. This is from his TNR piece, … [Read more...]
Greil Marcus and the History of Rock N Roll
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="1o2sCoXE2Fn6bznjQ3wr9tT1LIaHHcnX"] MANY of us interested in music, American history and culture in general discovered this scholar and scribe with one of his great early books like Mystery Train or Lipstick Traces. Marcus popularized the idea of using music as a "secret history" for other cultural forms, his book connecting Dylan's Basement Tapes to Harry Smith's … [Read more...]
David Mitchell’s “The Bone Clocks”
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="KUST1tJRtgkRnoQOLlZRPbrZOASSJtA8"] I'M not sure there's a novelist alive whose work I look forward to more than David Mitchell's. I say this even while sharing some mixed feelings about his new novel. The parts of this that work -- four and a half of its six parts -- are simply spectacular. In fact, I can't think of two many writers of any kind whose storytelling is … [Read more...]
Are We Really in a Gutenberg Moment?
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="n4bv9MRmUDoFtO6zdRvCDUwfVj0rxy5C"] OFTEN these days, we hear that the shift from the analog world of print to the online and digital world resembles what happened when Gutenberg's printing press reshaped Renaissance Europe, crushing Catholicism, spreading literacy and perhaps democracy, and overturning old ways. People who frame our current transition this way often … [Read more...]
Have We Lost the Ability to Be Alone?
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="wInG9qIiyZXfe5IWkw9gGzmkXV2eQ06T"] A COUPLE of decades into it, we're still figuring out what the Internet is doing to us, as individuals and as a society. A fascinating interview with the author of a new book, The End of Absence, get at this in a nuanced way. Author Michael Harris talks about the difference between the digital era and the age of Gutenberg, the … [Read more...]
Philip Roth, Le Guin Take on Amazon
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="65McoqrzvnW78eClGabJ9zi1OijdJLHZ"] WRITERS and artists are notoriously difficult to corral; it's both built into the job description and something that keeps the creative class from asserting itself. But lately a number of scribes have united in an effort to resist the bullying of the online bookseller. The New York Times reports : Now, hundreds … [Read more...]
The Roots of Author Jeff Hobbs
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="vsIAkFjrXusRtaqu8qZ48niChaYcVmTM"] ONE of the breakout books of the fall is Jeff Hobbs's new chronicle of his Yale roomate, a young black man who escaped the streets of Newark and found himself, in the end, pulled back down by some of the same old forces. I'm reading The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace now and amazed at how rich the detail is: It's powerful -- … [Read more...]
An LA Novelist Pleads With Amazon
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="2X67n54jvsskEeTyvZeL9ZzPV0yO4y6x"] JANET Fitch, a friend whose writing I admire, has written an open letter to Jeff Bezos of Amazon about what the online bookseller is doing to the literary trade and the the nation's "intellectual life." Amazon's dominance means its decisions matter, she writes: "I'd like this profession of author to remain a possibility for young … [Read more...]