Friday Links: August 5th, 2022
Lost library items, Stephen King in court, and bookish ants
The Museum of Library Stuff
Via NPR, the Oakland Public Library has started hosting an online gallery of stuff left in returned library books. There are postcards, love notes, bits of magazine cutouts, sticky notes, cartoons. Personally, the worst thing I’ve ever left in a library book was a favorite bookmark from a few years ago. Maybe we should start leaving cryptic clues in books to mess with bored librarians? Ruth Ozeki had a lot of fun with at premise in The Book of Form and Emptiness.
Stephen King Goes to Court
But not like that. In a week when “merger” was dominated by the newly-wedded Warner Bros. Discovery drowning HBO Max in the bathtub and shoving a finished movie down the memory whole for tax purposes, while the biggest trial in the US was Alex Jones getting royally and righteously screwed by his own lawyers’ incompetence, the Department of Justice also started its antitrust trial against a proposed merger between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. The DOJ had a star witness on their side: Stephen King, there to argue that further consolidation would drive down author advances and ultimately destroy more literary careers than it would create. You can get the details here, from the LA Times. Quote:
During 45 minutes of testimony, King laid out the changes he’s witnessed over a half-century career in collaboration with a number of different publishers. He described independent publishers becoming increasingly “squeezed” by conglomerates. “The reason they’re being squeezed is because they don’t get the shelf space that they used to because the majors take a lot of that shelf space.”
He described his early years with indie publishers as the glory days, recalling his phone ringing nonstop during auctions as his agent fielded offers from smaller publishers. But he eventually migrated to what’s now become the Big Five because of their wider distribution networks and deeper pockets.
If I were Stephen King (and the only reason I’m not is because I chose the purer, more spiritually nourishing field of blogging), I would simply take all of my money and sign up with an obscure indie press that lets me do weird, Stephen King shit with my books. Blood-red fonts! Creepy viral marketing! Pop-up illustrations of ghosts and cadavers! But I’m glad he’s also taking time off to speak up about a merger that will leave nearly 50% of published books in the hands of a single corporation.
More AI Writing: Artsy Screenwriting Edition
GPT-3 is moving into the movie business. A quick Google search suggests that there have been a few attempts at this before, but unlike those, this one is actually playing in a legitimate venue. Artist and animator Miao Ying, working with GPT-3 output trained on a diet of Chinese romance novels, advertisements, and B.F. Skinner’s famously terrible utopian novel Walden II, Surplus Intelligence is now playing at New York’s Asia Society. Here’s a synopsis, from WIRED:
IN ARTIST MIAO Ying’s animated film Surplus Intelligence, a cockroach falls in love with the artificial intelligence responsible for monitoring her behavior. There’s only one problem: The AI, personified as a man with movie-star looks, committed a crime in Walden XII, the quasi-medieval fantasyland where the story is set. He stole the village’s power stone, and so the roach sets off to mine bitcoin to save him.
So far, I haven’t been able to find any clips or previews on YouTube. But if Warner Bros. Discovery is looking for any more ways to cut costs in their film production subsidiaries and aren’t worried about quality and coherence (and why would they? It’s the Discovery Channel), I might be able to recommend a very fast, very cheap writer…
Amazonians Shopping on Amazon
When Mariana Lopes Vieira of Brazil picked up her Kindle reader for the first time in a few months, she noticed that it wouldn’t turn on. Then she noticed that it was covered with white ants. Then she got purchase receipts by email from Amazon, thanking her for purchasing two books. Vieira hadn’t bought anything: the ants did. Apparently, she’d enabled one-click buying (first mistake), which allowed the massive ant colony inside her e-reader (second mistake) purchase books by skittering across the screen. The most important question, obviously, is: what did the ants buy?
Robots and Empire, by Isaac Asimov
O anel de Giges: uma fantasia etica (The Ring of Gyges: An Ethical Fantasy), by Eduardo Gianetti
Unfortunately, O anel de Giges isn’t available in translation, but if I’m reading the Amazon page right, it’s “a timely, erudite reflection on the difference between seeming and being” inspired by Plato’s myth about Gyges and his invisible ring. I hope the ants enjoyed it.
From (ugh) The Sun, by way of LitHub.
More On Book Banning
In his Atlantic newsletter, among other things Connor Friedersdorff asks the question: is it worse to ban a book through government censorship, or cancel it before it’s published? Essentially, he’s getting at the political right vs. left approaches to removing objectionable works from public circulation. My views, as I’ve written in this space before, are pretty close to Friedersdorff: banning books from libraries is a dumb, counterproductive move that only makes the book more accessible and more popular. Censorship in an authoritarian state is one thing, but when you do it in a free society, you just get the Streisand Effect. Suppressing a manuscript through editorial pressure, though, keeps it from ever entering the public sphere in the first place, no matter how free the society is. I want to believe in the chilling effect hypothesis, which I’ve seen advanced elsewhere, but I still haven’t seen a lot of data on this. Mostly, you hear about people who know people who say that everybody at Publisher X is secretly pissed off about having to list their pronouns on Zoom or whatever, but is too scared to speak up because of the super-woke interns. We keep hearing enough variations on this story that it’s probably true somewhere at least some of the time.
Bibliophilia Recommends
I’ve decided to start using this weekly roundup space to also list some of my favorite books on books. First up, in both my bibliophilia pile and my heart in general, is The Geography of the Imagination by Guy Davenport.
In his long life (1927-2004), Davenport lurked right around the edges of American literature as a protege of the original Modernists (Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams), then as a legendarily cranky English professor who turned his Freshman Lit courses into freewheeling rambles about cave art, Picasso, Fourierism, Greek pottery, and Medieval Latin cosmology. In between rants, he wrote some of the finest stories and essays in American literature in this compact, punchy mix of dry sarcasm and encompassing intellect. Geography focuses on the non-fiction. Here’s a taste, from the title essay:
Man was first a hunter, and an artist: his early vestiges tell us that alone. But he must always have dreamed, and recognized and guessed and supposed, all the skills of the imagination. Language itself is a continuously imaginative act. Rational discourse outside our familiar territory of Greek logic sounds to our ears like the wildest imagination. The Dogon, a people of West Africa, will tell you that a white fox named Ogo frequently weaves himself a hat of string bean hulls, puts it on his impudent head, and dances in the okra to insult and infuriate God Almighty, and that there's nothing we can do about it except abide him in faith and patience.
This is not folklore, or quaint custom, but as serious a matter to the Dogon as a filling station to us Americans. The imagination; that is, the way we shape and use the world, indeed the way we see the world, has geographical boundaries like islands, continents, and countries. These boundaries can be crossed. That Dogon fox and his impudent dance came to live with us, but in a different body, and to serve a different mode of the imagination. We call him Brer Rabbit.
Most of the book is like that, taking these wild swings between the very ancient and the very modern, tracing these hidden linkages, mostly through books. More than any other writer of books on books, Davenport makes a real adventure out of his reading. He makes the world bigger, and more fascinating. I know of no better book on books.