Mark Linkous died by his own hand a year ago today.
To create the literature of fact, we have to work like novelists in many ways. We select. We cast light on this object, shadow on that. We imagine. We imagine what it is like to be that old Albanian woman weeping over the body of her murdered son, or what it was like to be a 14th-century French serf. No good history or reportage was ever written without a large imaginative sympathy with the people you are writing about. Our characters are real people; but we shape them like characters, using our own interpretation of their personalities. Then we talk of “Michelet’s Napoleon”, “Taine’s Napoleon”, and “Carlyle’s Napoleon”, for each Napoleon is in some important sense the author’s creation.The property of deliberate imagining is certainly not confined to the Tanzania of fiction. Imagination is the sun that illuminates both countries. But this leads us into temptation. A voice in your ear whispers, “You know that Kenyan in the slouch hat really did say that awfully funny thing you think he almost said. Just write it down. No one will ever know. And look, just across the frontier there is that gorgeous flower - the one missing novelistic detail that will bring the whole story alive. Pop across and pick it. No one will notice.” I know this voice. I have heard it. But if we claim to write the literature of fact, it must be resisted.
When I started to use [Kodachrome], its stability was well known (and still unique), and was a strong consideration in my choosing it: the little rectangles into which I poured such labour would still be readable in 50 or 100 years’ time. The commercial look of Kodachrome was also important for I was trying to turn the most advanced visual means of commerce against itself in recording the ruins of Thatcher’s first recession: the boarded-up shop fronts, derelict workplaces and unswept streets. Outdoors, under gloomy British skies, Kodachrome’s deep blacks – its shadow layer – became, with a touch of underexposure that also saturated the colours, wells of melancholy. Should we mourn the passing of a commercial product, particularly one with such a mixed history? Most cultural works are made with such products. Duchamp pointed out that even paintings could be thought of as ‘ready made’, being mere reorganisations of material squeezed from off-the-shelf tubes. Just as it takes practice and time to learn how to use a camera or a lens, so it does to know how both will interact with a type of film. The technical conservatism of professional photographers is purposeful. They are defending their hard-won knowledge: in what circumstances is a film best used, how does it bear detail in highlight and shadow, how does it behave in different lighting conditions? So the end of Kodachrome may be regretted as an abrupt extinction of techniques, practices and knowledge.
Whatever the reason for the gender imbalance, college administrators across the country have been going to great lengths to lasso the boys—adding sports programs, building bigger gyms, and expanding departments in engineering, math, and the hard sciences, which are historically attractive to men. And the presidents make sure their admissions directors are doing their best to ‘rectify’ the problem of gender imbalance by lowering the academic threshold for the (mostly white) boys who apply. Anyone who doubts the futility of human progress should ponder this. After several generations of vicious racism, followed by protest marches, civil rights lawsuits, accusations of bigotry, appeals to color-blindness, feminism, and eloquent invocations of the meritocratic ideal, the latest admissions trend in American higher education is affirmative action for white men. Just like the old days.
My neighbor shrugged. ’[The college application essay is] an exercise,’ he said. ‘You want to see if the applicant can craft something impressive.’ Craft? He’d used one of my least favorite nouns-turned-into-verbs. People are 'crafting’ all over the place nowadays—lawyers say they craft briefs, directors craft movies, teachers craft lesson plans, and most recently I’d heard an admissions director say she 'crafted’ her incoming class—so I shouldn’t have been surprised to see that crafting now applied to high school kids: the college applicant as artisan.
Left-handedness has sometimes been treated as pathological. Cesare Lombroso, the infamous 19th-century physician who identified various facial (and racial) features with criminal traits, also saw left-handedness as evidence of pathology, primitivism, savagery and criminality. And I was brought up with the story that a generation ago, in the bad old days (and in the old country), foolish unenlightened people tried to force left-handed children to convert and use their right hands. My father said that my uncle, his older brother, had had his left hand tied behind his back as a child.
When I was a child my parents (in the “old country” of Alabama) made sure I wrote with my right hand because they thought it would make life easier for me in school. But they never stopped me when I ate, combed my hair, brushed my teeth, shot pool, and fired arrows from bows, all left-handed. When I broke my right arm in high school I spent the next six weeks writing left-handed without too much difficulty. But then, I have always hit baseballs and shot basketballs right-handed (though I use my left hand a lot on the basketball court). If I have any delicate and precise work to do with my hands — say, repairing my eyeglasses — I always use my left hand. My right hand feel stronger to me, my left one more precise.
I am not ambidextrous if that means being able to perform any given task equally well with my either hand. But I am ambidextrous if that means using different hands for different tasks.
But let’s go back to the math of the Kindle authors. While their cut is better than traditional publishers, it is not 100% (70% at the most), and the price is low, very low. Let’s say they average $1 profit per book – that is about the same as the royalty on a paper book. So if they are able to produce one book per year, they need not 1,000 true fans, not 10,000, but 100,000 fans. The solution for authors is to sell more than just the book. They sell the uncut version, or the notes, the shorts, an audio version, an anthology, etc. And by definition, the true fan will purchase all these, which raises their support to more than a few dollars to tens of dollars. But in the digital marketplace, prices per piece will be low, unless the supplemental goods and services are personalized or limited. While there are now stars of true-fandom, most indie creators, on average, are not making a living off their true fans. There are still way fewer digital native artists thriving without publishers than those with some deals in New York.
Why assign any special value to an hour spent online in the first place? Given the proven models of revenue on the web, it’s reasonable to assume that a good chunk of those trillion-plus online hours are devoted to gambling and downloading porn. Yes, the networked web world does produce some appreciable social goods, such as the YouTubed “It Gets Better” appeals to bullied gay teens contemplating suicide. But there’s nothing innate in the character of digital communication that favors feats of compassion and creativity; for every “It Gets Better” video that goes viral, there’s an equally robust traffic in white nationalist, birther and jihadist content online. A “cognitive surplus” has meaning only if one can ensure a baseline value to all that dreary inconvenient time we “while away” in our individual lives, and establishing that baseline is inherently a political question, one that might be better phrased as either “Surplus for what?” or “Whose surplus, white man?”
[Allan] Bloom described his students as unmoved by loved and death, fit to be competent technical specialists and nothing more. They were social solitaries, locked up in themselves, the most erotically lame people ever. They weren’t open to God, didn’t think of themselves of citizens, didn’t have real heroes, and even found it about impossible even to think of themselves as family men and women. Bloom even said that their music was nothing more than the rhythm of mechanical rutting. Their eros had become that one-dimensional!And so, of course, they even turned friendship into networking. The social network, from this view, isn’t about real friendship or real social life. It’s about people casually exploiting each other to meet their pedestrian personal needs. The film [“The Social Network”] seems to confirm Bloom’s description by not giving us an example of enduring, trustworthy friendship or enduring love between a man and a woman or of a fairly functional and loving family.