Alan Jacobs

You can use my name on your board, I guess, although I generally try to keep off of letterheads unless I am able to be of substantial assistance. When I moved to this address, I went into the office of an interesting looking little institution next door – to find out what they did. So they explained that they set up burn clinics all over the world, and had begun doing this in Viet Nam, and so on. At the end of their explanation, though, they said that I really should have known something about their work already, since I was on their letterhead. A few years back, I had even signed a deeply moving appeal for funds, with photographs and all. Good for me.

The substitution of online for bookstore distribution of books will provide a substantial social saving and, as I said, increase the demand for books by reducing their retail price. As for the effect on publishers and authors of books, there is concern that it will be adverse, but that seems unlikely. A seller tries to minimize his cost of distribution, just as he tries to minimize his other costs; the publisher is the ultimate seller, and the bookstore part of the chain of distribution. But there is an important, and potentially relevant, exception, and that is where a distributor provides point-of-sale services that increase the demand for the product. This is the rationale for resale price maintenance: manufacturers of some goods place a floor under the retail price of the goods, thus deliberately increasing the retailers’ margin, but hoping by doing so to induce them to engage in nonprice competition that will increase the demand for the goods. Bookstore staffs, by decisions they make concerning choice and display of books to carry, and by making purchasing suggestions to customers, can, in principle, increase the demand for books. But these services cannot guarantee the survival of many bookstores, because unless the services are valued by a greater margin than seems realistic to expect, there will be too few customers to defray the bookstore’s fixed costs at acceptable prices.

The question then becomes whether the loss of point-of-sale services that bookstores provide will hurt publishers (and therefore authors, whose prosperity is linked to that of publishers) more than it will help them by reducing their distribution costs. That too is doubtful. As technology continues its forward march, online booksellers will find it increasingly feasible to duplicate and indeed improve on the point-of-sale services that bookstores offer. Bookstores will decline, and perhaps vanish when the current older generation, consisting of people habituated to printed books (as to printed newspapers), dies off. Yet this may well represent genuine economic progress, just as department stores and supermarkets represent progress though they cause the demise of countless small retailers

Back then, the basic unit of Internet buzz was the blog entry. Blogs, which today seem so quaint, gave you the chance to stretch out and make case for… well, whatever the oppressive world of printed matter wouldn’t give you the space to do. When it came to books, a blog post was, at minimum, a relatively stable bit of online enthusiasm. Like happy locusts, or any locusts at all, enough of them could keep you up at night, or blot out the sky. The best ones, though, were well-considered reviews that—even when they didn’t carry the imprimatur of a famous name or publication—put into circulation an account of your book by someone who had read it. Acknowledgment is one thing; that’s why authors lose sleep over landing in the NYRB. Blogs, though, allow for a wide, wide net of coercion, or if you want to be democratic about it, a variety of critical accounts.

Criticism isn’t just a way of conserving time and energy. It’s also an important translation skill. It’s easy to piece together a review that relies solely on comparisons and referents; it’s also bad writing and altogether useless for anyone who doesn’t already know the author, or run in exactly the same circles, taste-wise. A review is, in theory, helpful. That’s what language is for: it makes a movie, record, book, or film into a universal. This kind of communication is tied into consumerism, to be sure, but it’s also part of why—even as all authority comes crashing down—criticism matters. People want to understand, or be advised.

‘Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you’re in favor of it,’ McLuhan explained during an uncharacteristically candid interview in 1966. 'The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certain to be something I’m resolutely against, and it seems to me the best way of opposing it is to understand it, and then you know where to turn off the button.’ Though the founders of Wired magazine would posthumously appoint McLuhan as the 'patron saint’ of the digital revolution, the real McLuhan was more a Luddite than a technophile. He would have found the collective banality of Facebook and other social networks abhorrent, if also fascinating.

Is it ever right to just wind up and let someone have it with all you’ve got? That’s a question that I think has to be asked. It’s certainly possible that we’ve all become too used to unrestrained rhetoric as a form of entertainment, and people like me live right in the middle of the guilt parabola there. Most all of us are grownups and can handle extreme argument, but clearly some people are not, and obviously I’m not just talking about Jared Loughner. To see that, all you have to do is attend almost any family gathering, where once-loving relationships have been completely lost because of the overheated right-left culture war. If real family relationships are being lost to this kind of political debate, if someone on TV can reach into your living room and break up your family without knowing anything about you or even knowing that you exist, that tells us that this mechanized mass-media rhetoric has been almost unimaginably successful at dehumanizing whole classes of people.

brief iPad reading update

A schoolmaster’s calling is usually but poor and very painful, requiring much close attendance; but yet it is of so great use to the common good, and alloweth the mind so much leisure and advantage to improve itself in honest studies, that it is fitter to be chosen and delighted in by a well-tempered mind, than richer and more honoured employments. It is sweet to be all day doing so much good.

The atrocity in Tucson on Saturday was a horrifying act of political nihilism. As everyone knows, six innocent people were murdered, and thirteen more very seriously injured, including Rep. Giffords, who was the main target of the assassin. Obviously, the killer was deranged, but the same could probably be said about Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist assassin of William McKinley. That doesn’t make their destructive goals any less political. Nihilism is a charge that a lot of people have thrown around in the last few years, and it has usually been wrong. There are so few actual nihilists that it is usually a mistake to label someone this way, but it seems appropriate in this case. Nihilism is usually the wrong word to use because nihilism is ‘far removed from politics as we normally understand it,’ to use Brooks’ phrase describing Loughner’s thinking, but if anything describes Loughner’s ideas that would seem to be it.

Aside from repugnant opportunism, the main reason why some liberals have tried connecting this atrocity with conventional Republicans and Palin’s demagoguery is that the assassin’s actual politics are so strange and unfamiliar. As horrible and genuinely senseless as it was, the massacre might make some sense if it could be linked to familiar political disputes and woven into ready-made narratives. It might lend the suffering and deaths of all these people some special meaning if they could be seen as political martyrs who were attacked by identifiable extremists from the other 'side’ because of their convictions, but that wasn’t the case. What is disturbing about Loughner’s attack is that it most likely could have been directed against any public official who happened to draw his ire. No one really knows what to do with someone who takes the view of Bazarov when he says, 'Aristocratism, liberalism, progress, principles….Just think, how many foreign…and useless words!’ For that reason, many people tend to turn to convenient scapegoats and default villains

Augustine’s Confessions (the very title implies an admission of guilt) is considered the first Western autobiography ever written, or in other words, the first public personal revelation. As in much of Christian first-person literature that followed—Hildegard of Bingen’s visions, Martin Luther’s Tabletalk accounts, John Newton’s “Amazing Grace,” Charles Wesley’s journals, C. S. Lewis’s Pilgrim’s Regress—Confessions combines declaration, admission, and revelation all under an awning of transformation.

It isn’t too much of a stretch to say that this is very much what is happening in live storytelling across New York City. Whether the stories are funny or sad, they are always personal and they always contain a narrative arc, some sort of transformation. And because the stories are live, the audience is a participant, learning as much about themselves as about the storyteller. Furthermore, to call stories in which people detail their often-R-rated comedy of errors or sexcapades ‘confessions’ or ‘defenses’ doesn’t feel like an overstatement either.

Mike Daisey, who is referred to as 'the master storyteller—one of the finest solo performers of his generation,’ was raised Catholic. When Allison, who also has a Catholic background, first saw Daisey perform, he couldn’t pinpoint why Daisey was so effective. 'What is it about the beautiful music, the rhythms and volumes and tones of his stories?’ Allison asked himself. 'And then I realized it’s a homily! It’s in his blood, in his upbringing.’

Ruined Armenian churches. More astonishing photos here. Hat tip to Tim Maly.