selling out, in the land of the Amazons

To me, advertising is to art what prostitution is to love; one exists in the negative space of the other. Which is not to say that I find prostitution to be immoral; it's just unfortunate, uninspired. (What I find odd is that advertising is legal and prostitution is not.) And I don't oppose the vigorous and creative promotion of ideas, nor the efforts of the small-time entrepreneur to carve out a niche for himself. But the road is fraught with Faust's temptations at every turn. And what profits a man, when he gains the world and loses his soul along the way?

Ah. And so but how does a humble blogger earn a living? There's Google AdSense: they will brand you with a hot iron if you're interested. Some bloggers sell e-books, which I think is great, although many harmful chemicals are released when e-books are burned. (And any book that no one would want to burn is not really a book.) Some hide behind paywalls, which is kind of like wearing a lot of makeup.

Then there's selling out to Amazon, which is the path I've chosen. Here's how it works: you sign up for an Amazon associates account, and post links on your blog which shoot right over to the Amazon "product" you're referencing. If your reader then purchases the item from Amazon, you get 15% of the total. So, in my previous post on Jonathan Franzen's much-ballyhooed new novel Freedom, I have linked to both this work and to the other books I mention (Franzen's The Corrections, Tolstoy's War and Peace, Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Joyce's Ulysses). Simple text links, no pop-up or image ads, no clutter, nothing. If you're curious to know how, for me, Ulysses changed the fabric of reality (i.e., the template), you'll click on it and be able to order it immediately. Of course, Ulysses is probably the least likely impulse purchase one could possibly make, but anyway.

So yes, if you order a book through my blog, I will profit. Of course, Amazon is destroying independent bookstores, and I don't feel good about it. But actually, I don't care about independent bookstores per se. I care about what they do, and what they do is provide a portal between writer and reader, with (hopefully) a mere diaphane of commercial mediation. As I'm an unfunded writer, and I'm directly speaking to my readers and urging them to step out of the nightmare ("History," says Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, "is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake"), I don't think this is unethical. Amazon is trying to snare them as customers, and so it's worth it to them to give the profits to me. If my readers have got the pliable steel guts they're going to need to make it in this world, they won't end up Amazombies.

I will soon be setting up a booklist on my blog, as well, which will guide my readers through the land of the flowering canon, and help them distinguish between what is nourishing and what is merely saccharine. I'll include a disclosure, too, concerning my policy of linking to Amazon for books that I reference or recommend.

Soylent Green is corporations!!!

A great, concise, and cutting opinion piece by Notre Dame philosophy professor Gary Gutting, which explores exactly how for-profit corporations are antithetical to democracy. It's not the usual structuralist argument; Gutting instead underlines something we all instinctively know ("The corporate threat is most apparent in advertising, which explicitly aims at convincing us to prefer a product regardless of its actual merit."), and concludes that corporations are necessarily a "threat to truth," a value fundamental to democracy. He contrasts corporate speech with the political speech of groups such as the ACLU and the NRA, who at least theoretically represent the convictions of actual people. Corporations, in Gutting's analysis, are not evil, per se. They are, however, necessarily amoral, and that's what makes them dangerous.

I commented on the piece as follows (tongue in both cheeks):

     If corporations are people, do their lives begin at conception? What about a corporation conceived in an ill-advised, late-night financial planning session? Should the parties be allowed to terminate their creation on the morning after, or be forced to bring it to term, even if they're not ready to raise a corporation? What if the partnership ends? Visitation rights?

     There's a lot the Supreme Court didn't think of, methinks.

     Although, if corporations were people, you could take out restraining orders on them, right? As it stands (at least here in Arizona), a corporation can obtain an "injunction against workplace harassment" against a journalist or whistleblower. (This is absolutely true, and yes, it's oft abused.) But it doesn't work the other way around: you can't get a restraining order against a corporation. Corporate peoplehood would change that, no?

     Wouldn't it be nice to get a restraining order on your favourite bill-collector? One stray communique, and they're suddenly doing time for felony harassment. . .

The Banality of Freedom: Jonathan Franzen

Franzen, Time, inverted.

Calling a writer experimental is now the equivalent of saying his work does not matter, is not readable, and is aggressively masturbatory. But why is it an experiment to attempt something artistic? A painter striving for originality is not called experimental. . . Without risk, you have paintings hanging in the lobby of the Holiday Inn. 

      -Ben Marcus in Harper's Magazine, October 2005

If you're the kind of person who suffers from cultural bucket-list anxiety, you've been introduced to a new little gremlin of a meme over the past several months. Jonathan Franzen's latest novel, Freedom, has manifested itself in the manner of a solar eclipse: its viewers have gathered in worship from coast to coast, but none have looked directly at it. None, would seem, except the Atlantic's B.R. Myers, in his cutting review "Smaller than Life."

Freedom's title says everything you need to know about Jonathan Franzen: it's ostentatiously lazy, presumptuously avuncular, headline-grubbing, Europe-snubbing, all-encompassing without bothering to encompass. Yet it's been greeted as a liberator, drooled over; palm fronds have been strewn promiscuously in its path. The cues are from the horse's mouth, of course. Not only has it been compared with War and Peace; it actually compares itself with War and Peace. (One of the protagonists is reading Tolstoy; the pertinence to her own life of Natasha Rostov's confusion about whom to love is, quote, "psychedelic.")

I haven't read Freedom. I spent this past summer reading War and Peace instead. (Yes, it's worth it, if you have a hundred days to kill.) But I did read Franzen's 2001 novel The Corrections. No, I couldn't put it down while I was reading it. It brimmed over  with nefarious Lithuanians, extramarital shenanigans, hip urban gardens, pharmaceutical chicanery, voyeuristic accounts of lesbian sex. Cheap pop hooks by the score; paint-by-numbers pop-culture references? Galore.

I haven't thought about The Corrections, though, since I finished it. Not once. It's breeding dust on the shelf with the other crap I'll never touch again. I would contrast this with Gabriel Garcia Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, a book I found vastly frustrating and pointless while I was reading it. But when I closed its pages, I became obsessed; transformed; a different person. (And Ulysses? It's a tough book to read all the way through. But for me, it's changed the fabric of reality.)

In 2005, Harper's Magazine published an essay by Ben Marcus with the (ironic) title of "Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life As We Know It: A Correction."  (Only the first page is available free online, although even that much is worth reading. The rest is behind a paywall.) At the time, I had just given up six years of my young life to the writing of an "experimental" novel, and I was twisting in the wind; Marcus's essay brought me back to myself. He excoriates and ridicules the "realist" establishment in modern literature, deriding as a "desperate argument. . . the notion that reality can be represented only through a certain kind of narrative attention." Two persons are identified, here, as the main current ambassadors of the narrative realism perfected long ago by John Updike and others: Jonathan Franzen, and "dour" Atlantic Monthly critic B.R. Myers.

Which is why I was fascinated that the latter was the only major critic to not only pan Franzen's "masterpiece," but to drag it out into the sun and leave it to rot dry.

Myers appears most often in the pages of the Atlantic dissecting the underpinnings of North Korean fascism; although originally from New Jersey (as am I), he has lived in West Germany and apartheid South Africa, and holds both an M.A. in Soviet Studies and a Ph. D. in North Korean literature. So he knows something about "freedom," maybe even more than Jonathan Franzen. (He is also a supporter of the Green Party of the United States (as am I).)

By the end of his first paragraph, Myers has summed up Franzen's novel as a "576-page monument to insignificance." Quoting heavily from the original, he blasts Franzen's insipid prose as "insecure":

We find the same insecure style on The Daily Show and in the blogosphere; we overhear it on the subway. It is the style of all who think highly enough of their own brains to worry about being thought “elitist,” not one of the gang.

And Franzen, I'd argue, is the worst kind of elitist: the kind that won't admit it. The kind that panders. (The Corrections has a major character named "Chip," for God's sake!) An unrepentant liberal, he nonetheless has this common with right wing demagogues like Bill O'Reilly of Fox News.
I admit, there's a little pinge in me for coming down so hard on Franzen; I know that he was a close personal friend of David Foster Wallace. I got my start in publishing by writing Wallace's obituary for the Tucson Weekly, a circle-of-life moment if ever there was one, and I'm still struggling with his suicide. It seems to me that Franzen, sadly, lacks Wallace's genius: the ability to lay one's intellect out on the page without coming off like a snob. And so he went off in the opposite direction.

The NY Times called Freedom "a masterpiece of fiction;" Maureen Corrigan, NPR's in-house reviewer, called it "revelatory and ambitious." So I'll read it, eventually, maybe the next time I come down with bronchitis.

Don't click on this

"he not busy being born/ is busy dying" -Bob Dylan

PAPARAZZI: pl. n., sing. PAPARAZZO: one who lacks a moral compass; also, a parasitic photojournalist. [from Ital., "daddy rats"]

Ok, that's not the real derivation, though it probably should be. In case this folk etymology goes viral, remember, you heard it here first. Anyway. . . "The Day I Trailed a Paparazzo," a feature piece for Jezebel by Dodai Stewart, recently wafted out of the miasma and appeared on my computer screen. I think it came out of the pipes or something. There are no surprises in it, except for the fact that there are no surprises. If you're picturing a Fellini-esque circus of pop stars, crotch-shots, split-finger telephones, and well-dressed fistfights, well you've got it all wrong. The average day in the life of a paparazzo is, to put it bluntly, boring. And reading about it is profoundly boring. Life is too short. I can never recover those grains of sand; they've gone down the hatch of time, never to be recovered, dead as Elvis, dead as Michael Jackson.

There's an old Twilight Zone episode, ever since widely parodied and referenced, where a bibliophile (played by Burgess Meredith) who could never find enough time to read ends up as the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust, discovers the ruins of a library, and happily settles down to spend the rest of his existence reading his way through every word that was ever written. And but then, he stumbles, drops his eyeglasses, and finds that they've shattered. As the camera pans out, he's left blind, despairing, among the rubble.

It could have been worse. He could have stumbled upon an US Weekly warehouse, or a truck full of People.

Please, don't waste your time with this crap. The human race needs you.

How to get your blog on a search engine (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Google)

Here's some basic info for neophytes about how to make your blog visible to search engines.

First, some creepy technofascist stuff. Google (along with the other engines) uses "spiders" to "crawl" around the web, moving link to link, searching and mapping the Internet. They don't look at your actual blog; they subsist entirely on your HTML. Unfortunately, we actually want to attract these insidious monstrosities to our blogs. Search engines don't search the Internet itself; they search an index their spiders have made for them. And so we must learn to dance their dance if we want to get our content out there.

The big websites are crawling with spiders, but out here among the stars, they're few and far between. To attract their attention, you have to set off a flare. That's what "pinging" is. It's jumping up and down and waving your hands. If your site is hosted by GoDaddyLongLegs or whatever, they'll do that for you (I'm pretty sure that's right). If all you've got is a lowly Blogger blog, you're on your own.

So here's a few beginning steps to lure those arachnids your way.

First, go to your PC's Start Menu, click on Run, and then enter "cmd" and hit return or press OK. This opens up the command prompt window. This is how you talk to your computer directly, without an operating system (Windows XP or Vista or whatever) to get in the way. Type the following (if you have a Blogger blog; obviously, "yourblognamehere" is a placeholder):

          "ping www.yourblognamehere.blogspot.com"

Ok, you just pinged yourself. How does it feel?

What your computer just did was to send a tiny packet of data to your blog and back. It took less than a tenth of a second. If that website didn't exist, it wouldn't work. (I just tried http://www.seahorse-magistrate.com/ and the ping failed.)

Next, you want to ping Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc., with your blog URL (your web-address). I'm going to stick to Google for the moment; there's a simple form that you can use to submit your URL for crawling/indexing. You can find it here. Just type in your URL, verify that you're not an android, and Google will come and check out your site. Sometimes it can take a while, and they say that they won't guarantee that your site will actually get indexed, but it didn't take that long for me to be able to Google "realitysand" and find my blog.

(In fact, a Google search for "Tucson Sentinel Green Party" comes up with my post about the Sentinel's non-coverage of the Green Party as #5!)

Here's the problem, though; your site is indexed now, but how will Google know when you post new content? You're still not big enough for the spiders to remember where you are. That's where pinging comes in. There are several (free) web services that will ping to tons of different search engines and blog listings for you, but as far as I've been able to tell, you have to actually go to their websites every time you update your blog. But if you only update your blog infrequently, this shouldn't be too much extra work.

So here's how you do it: go to one of these free sites (Pingoat and Pingomatic worked for me; Autopinger is supposed to have more coverage, but I kept getting error messages when I tried to register on their site). Pretty much all you have to do is enter your blogname and URL. Then, bookmark or add to Favorites on your web browser; you can either add them to your Favorites Bar or create a separate folder under Favorites. Each time you update your blog, just click on that link and it'll start pinging for you all over again.

Check out the Blog Doctor for more. This is an old post, so some of the links no longer work, but it's a good starting place nonetheless.

Five (and a half) worthy Blogs

I normally don't endorse mainstream media figures, but I have to say that columnist Paul Krugman (a Nobelist in Economics) maintains an excellent blog on all things politico-economic for the New York Times. This week, Krugman flashes back to the 1930s with a short clip of the great economist John Maynard Keynes, and comments on how Keynes' evident upper class British accent belies the "impishness and radicalism of his thought."

The Green Party Watch (not affiliated with the Green Party per se) is a great source for Green news and opinion. Recent posts concern the Green Party's call for a "Green New Deal" in contrast to Obama's enervated "jobs" package and speculations about who the Greens will nominate for President at their 2012 convention. I'm hoping that Dr. Jill Stein will be our candidate: she has an impressive resume, is an effective communicator, and is photogenic to boot. I voted for her when she ran for Governor of Massachusetts back in 2002 (alas, some Mormon named "Mitt" won that race, so we left town).

Find out more.

My next choice is SandersForPresident.org, a blog that's agitating for independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont to challenge Obama in the Democratic primaries (there's also a rumour that he might run for the Green nomination, although I doubt that would actually happen). Sanders recently called for a progressive candidate to challenge Obama in 2012. You can sign the petition to draft him here. . .

Also, check out Democracy Now!'s blog, which features a lot of "Web Exclusives." In a broadcast in March of this year, Juan Gonzalez jointly interviewed Daniel Ellsberg (he of the "Pentagon Papers") and four-time Presidential candidate Ralph Nader. The Web Exclusive went into more detail, and included Ellsberg seconding Nader's call for the impeachment of Obama for war crimes.

Here's a snippet of the original interview:

Finally, I recommend ThisIsntHappiness.com, which is like a beach awash with the flotsam and jetsam of our culture: stick-figure cartoons, hacked images, random old sign-of-the-times pieces. It's hilarious, in a melancholic sort of way. You have to check it out.

The following is not the cartoon I found on ThisIsntHappiness, but it's from the same website: