The Fate of the Unread Writer in the Digital Age

I suppose that down to the '90s the problem of the unread author was little different from that of Jack London's Martin Eden. They toiled at their work, toiled at sending it out--and they collected form rejection letters from people as they went unread.

I imagine that many still follow this routine. But now they have the option of self-publishing. Thus they toil at their work, toil at publishing it themselves--and as the counters indicating page views and downloads and sales fail to tick up, still goes unread.

After all the sound and fury of technological change, the evolution of the Market and the effort to capitalize on it, where it really counted--finding an audience, making a living--the "aspiring" writer of today is no better off than they were before, and maybe even worse off, because collecting form rejection letters was a cheaper activity than producing a publishable book, because the wages for all writers are crashing in a world where PEOPLE DON'T READ, and now, we are told, the chatbots are coming for what little opportunity was left to them, eliminating the hope that they might make it someday because it looks as if there will no someday for anyone.

Demolition Man's Attempt at Satire and the Tenor of the '90s

After Rambo III Sylvester Stallone's career was in clear decline, but he went on headlining major action films for some time after, returning to the form with 1993's summer tentpole Cliffhanger--and that same autumn, Demolition Man.

I remember first seeing Demolition Man and being pleasantly surprised by its attempt at satire--I suppose, the fact that it tried at all rather than its being very good at it. After all, consider the subject matter so satirists have taken up over the years--the terms of daily survival at work and elsewhere, social hierarchy, religions, prejudice.

By contrast what do we have here? It seems here and there that there are hints of aspiration to something bigger, like its allusions to Aldous Huxley (as in its naming Sandra Bullock's character "Lenina Huxley") but mostly what we see is a heavy-handed attempt to impose "lameness" on society, identified with healthy diets, safe sex, clean language, "soothing" aesthetics, and the "mavericks" who won't have it, all too tellingly led by Denis Leary playing . . . well, his character's name was "Edgar Friendly," but really it seemed like it was just the already well-known Denis Leary persona.

It ends up very slight stuff indeed--and in that characteristically '90s, when the conventional wisdom held that all the big issues were decided, leaving us little to debt argue over little ones in the manner that made "What is the deal with that?" a catchphrase.

"Game-Changer"

In contrast with a lot of the words and phrases I discuss here (like the appalling "lifestyle") the term is not inherently annoying to me. I accept that a thing may well be a "game-changer."

My annoyance with the term has to do with how ridiculously low people set the bar for something being "game-changing."

I recall, for instance, a certain science fiction "fan site" that offered its list of twenty "game-changing" science fiction novels of the decade of the '00s.

The books in question did indeed each make a splash when they came out (mostly in the very small pond that is contemporary print science fiction, but some of them in larger pop cultural bodies of water as well).

But were they game-changers? Did they leave us unable to read or write in the ways we had before, the way that, for example, E.E. Smith's space operas or Isaac Asimov's Robot stories were arguably game-changers?

Even before the passage of the years made this even more starkly clear it was clear that they were not. After all, how dynamic would a fairly limited corner of the publishing world have to be for it to see twenty "game-changers" in a mere decade? Especially when the genre in question is, as I have said so many times, fairly old and stagnant by any such standard?

The term's use was just poptimist hype--as is generally the case when we hear words like "game-changer" trotted out.

"It Is What It Is."

"It Is What It Is" has long been high on the list of phrases that get on my nerves.

The reason, I think, is its combination of an air of

1. Pseudo-profundity (the repetitiveness, the circularity that leaves us right exactly where we started in the manner that impresses the gullible with utter meaninglessness) with

2. Callous dismissiveness passed off as tough-minded "realism."

This is the way the world is, they tell you, deal with it or don't, I don't care--with the "I don't care" the part that matters most.

It is a myth that the Inuit have fifty words for snow--but we seem to have fifty thousand ways of telling people right to their faces that we don't care about their problems, or about them, and the richness of our vocabulary in that particular area of communication would seem to me to say a great deal about us.

"Hard Work"

People speak--often, snarl--incessantly about "hard work," which is supposed to be held in respect.

Of course, if hard work were really respected in itself the hard work of the poor would be respected just as much as the hard work of the rich; the hard work of the so-called "failure" as much as that of the "success," the "loser" as of the "winner."

No reasonable person would pretend that this is the case--and so the snarling about "hard work" ends up another hypocritical rationalization of inequality. Those who have prospered are assumed to have "earned" what they have gained through "hard work," those who have not prospered to have failed not only to gain, but to work--all as no one dares ask if the poverty of the latter has anything to do with the riches of the former.

"Worth"

In the United States it has long been common for people to say that instead of a person "having" a hundred thousand dollars, or a hundred billion dollars, they are "worth" a hundred thousand dollars or a hundred billion dollars. And while I know this has been remarked by foreign observers with a socially critical turn of mind, it seems completely unremarked.

But like a great deal that goes unremarked--everywhere, and at all times and places--it really does merit remark as telling. And unfortunate. The idea of a human being "worth" the net financial value of their material assets is exceedingly degrading, and wrong. This is most obviously the case for those who have little, who are accordingly devalued, and especially those who have nothing, who are literally held to be worth nothing--to be worthless--which is, of course, the lot of the vast, vast majority of the planet. But one can also see it as often unpleasant for even the richest in a society where wealth is synonymous with highly volatile asset values. Smug as they may be about being "worth" more than everyone else, it cannot be a pleasant thing to wake up and find that one is "worth" less than they were the day before.

"Earn."

Some years ago I wrote about the use of the word "deserve"--the way its extreme overuse obscures what may or may not be right or fair with moral-sounding claims, generally in such a way as to shut down any thinking about life's inequities, propping up the position of the best-off, and undermine the claims of the disadvantaged for consideration.

So does it go with the word "earn." To say that one came by a given amount of money--"made" that money--is relatively neutral. To say that one "earned" the money is to insist on the money as a dessert, due compensation for "hard work," once again sanctifying outcomes that may or may have nothing to do with morality.

"You Get What You Pay For"

"You get what you pay for" a certain sort of person likes to say--usually to other people who have just been disappointed by a purchase, for whom the words are no comfort. (Rather this is a case of kicking someone while they are down.)

The truth is that, contrary to the price-worshipping market fundamentalism implicit in the phrase, we do not always get what we pay for. Sometimes we get more--especially when we are in a position to exploit others (a concept market fundamentalists pretend is meaningless). In other cases--probably more common for the great majority of us--we get less than we paid for. Which makes someone's quipping "You get what you pay for" in such a moment proof of their idiocy.

The Decline of the English Major, and the Readership of Literary Classics

According to a poll of some years ago some 31 percent of Britons have lied about reading Lev Tolstoy's War and Peace.

I would be shocked if anything close to 0.31 percent of Britain, or any other population in the world (perhaps excepting Russia--I'd be very curious to know if anyone has any information on this), really began and finished that book with any meaningful level of attentiveness.

If one goes by that logic that means that there are at least a hundred people who lie about having read War and Peace for every person who actually has read War and Peace.

Now, War and Peace is an exceptional case given the book's particular fame, reputation and, if not "difficulty" in the sense of difficulty of technique in the way we have become familiar with from the Modernists forward, then at least difficulty due to the demands the book makes on the attention and patience of the reader by virtue of its great length and structure (its looseness, crowdedness, digressiveness, etc.). But it is a reminder that in reality (as opposed to bad TV and movies where intellectual super-people are the norm) literary classics comprise a very limited part of the limited and declining amount of discretionary long-form fiction reading the public does.

Indeed, as previously remarked, the consumption of classics is small enough that it is conceivable that, where actual reading is concerned, few but students of Literature are doing very much of it. With the number of such students apparently in collapse at the college level I suspect this will translate to a significant contraction in such consumption--which in turn will have negative effects on the readiness of publishers to keep such work in print, and the prospects of such books coming to the attention of the general public.

Does that seem plausible to you?

Comic Book Superheroes in a Post-Comics World

In this day and age I suspect that, recognizable as the great Golden and Silver Age superheroes are, even the middle-aged of today (who grew up in the '80s, or later) know them more from adaptations of the comics than the comics themselves.

After all, there were so many alternative distractions that prior generations did not have, like video games.

There was the way that comics were increasingly accessed in specialty shops, so that you went out of your way to get them rather than happening upon them in a department store the way Frank Miller recounts having done when he was young.

And there was the fact that by that stage of things--the "Dark Age" of Comics--comics were less than ever for kids. The more objectionable "adult" content apart, the more exciting, cutting-edge, stuff was being written for a more hardcore, more literate audience (as with the work of an Alan Moore).

The result was that I encountered pretty much every major comic book character in TV or film form before I ever got around to reading a single page of their comics, and indeed in many a case those adaptations remain the standard by which all others are judged. While I did, for instance, get around to reading the earlier decades of the X-Men in those handy Marvel Essentials volumes, with particular attentiveness to Chris Claremont's justly celebrated run--to say nothing of seeing the million or so X-Men movies made to date--all these years on the FOX X-Men cartoon remains for me definitive, such that, great as Patrick Stewart was as Charles Xavier and Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, it is still Cedric Smith and Cal Dodd's voices I hear when I imagine the characters speaking when I am not actually watching their movies.

Has the Popularity of the English Major Declined Because English is Actually Too Hard a Subject for Today's Student?

Recently writing about the decline of the English major I took it for a response to the anti-humanities, pro-STEM propganda.

But I also wonder if, in contrast with the "soft major" image that English has that makes it such an object of disdain from the standpoint of intellectual accomplishment as well as employability, it is not a factor that many students are finding that major too hard.

Simply put, is it possible they eschew this course of education because they are not up to the demands of the reading? In an age of declining literacy the possibility seems to me to be well worth considering.

Remember When David Hasselhoff was Nick Fury?

Back in 1998 FOX was considering a Nick Fury TV series.

The show never happened, but a pilot did get filmed and aired on the channel, and in the years afterward was rerun quite a bit on various cable channels--Syfy, the ENCORE Channels, and so on, which was where I happened to catch it.

It starred David Hasselhoff as Fury, Lisa Rinna as Contessa De Fontaine, Sandra Hess as the Hydra leader Baroness Von Strucker.

The film was, of course, a '90s-era TV movie, not a $400 million Avengers production in an age of "If you can picture it, they can realize it for you in CGI" visual effects, but I remember it being reasonably effective within its technical and budgetary limitations, and striking an appealing tone--not taking itself too seriously, but not getting irritatingly goofy, either, as Fury and friends saved the world yet again.

Oppenheimer: A Few Thoughts

As the situation stands we know very little about Christopher Nolan's upcoming film Oppenheimer, while what we are told is confusing. It is supposed to be a period piece about the actual Robert Oppenheimer--but apparently a thriller as well that will somehow benefit from being presented on colossal I-MAX screens.

One can't but suspect some stretching of historical fact here.

I also have to admit that, in taking up this highly complex and political subject I suspect Christopher Nolan is "in over his head." After all, watching the Batman films, watching Inception, it was clear Nolan loved psycho-babble, and while sometimes his playing with it fell flat (as in Inception), there were times when it worked well (The Dark Knight seeming to me at its most compelling when the Batman-Joker duel was a Jungian psychodrama).

However, when he was trying to "say something" about society and its current problems I found myself not taking the results seriously--until the absolutely appalling The Dark Knight Rises left me with no choice. Subsequently Dunkirk was, especially coming in a moment when Britain's relationship to the world was so contentious, a historical, political film "without history or politics"--the fall of France was just an occasion for giant-screen spectacle held together by postmodernist blatherings.

But of course the claqueurs of the media, who loved that movie the same way they love everything Nolan does (arguably because of its weaknesses rather than in spite of them, with all that says about them), are clapping already for Oppenheimer, and saying the word "Oscar."

It's always possible that Nolan might surprise us--to use an admittedly tired phrase, "subvert our expectations" by actually "making it good." But I see no reason to expect that from someone who has enjoyed such fulsome praise so consistently for so long, and over the past two decades shown not the slightest indication of a capacity for seriously assessing his own work, let alone questioning anything outside of that--such that my expectations are not high for this one.

Why is the Silicon Valley Elite So Terrified By AI?

Douglas Rushkoff has long struck me as an interesting, if limited, social critic--at the least, willing and able to point out things that few others with even his level of access to the mainstream do. Thus has it gone with his remarks about the dread of artificial intelligence expressed by so many of the Silicon Valley elite about "AI" becoming independent and powerful and hostile. Where the mainstream media has, in line with its normal mode of operation , tended to do little but provide members of the elite and their favored spokespersons a colossal megaphone for their view, especially insofar as that view is sensationalist (rather than attempting to represent a genuine range of views), he at least seems to be on the right track when he quips that the powerful are afraid that, where they have for so long fancied themselves the demi-god masters of the universe, they are anxious that "the AIs are going to be as mean to them as they’ve been to us."

"The Dog-stealers"

I recall years ago reading of the 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition and how on its "special shilling days" when admission was discounted so that it was made affordable to the broader public the big Sommerophone organ was silent.

I also read Benjamin Disraeli's remark in a piece of private correspondence that he thought this a shame because of the "humanising effect" it might have "on the dog-stealers, cabmen and coalheavers" who came in.

While I do not want to diminish the complexity of Disraeli's political history it seems to me impossible to not take from this statement an extreme disdain for the "lower orders"--and indeed the term "dog-stealers," which I encountered here for the first time, struck me as a monument to the Victorian upper class' view of those whose toil in the conditions a Charles Dickens described so well made possible their luxury. ("'Dog-stealers?' Is that how they think of them?")

This did not change when I discovered that dog stealing (specifically, targeting the exotic and expensive status symbol-type pet dogs of the rich) for such purposes as ransom seems to have been a not insignificant species of Victorian-era crime--the more in as Disraeli so casually lumped in honest toilers as cabmen and coal heavers with criminals.

All the same, horrid as the Victorians were in such ways others have been no better--and the essential attitude remained the same even as the language changed (and I dare say, grew so much coarser that "dog-stealer" can seem genteel by comparison).