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Umm…. yeah, I just wrote this.

Tuesday is my 30th birthday. I’d like to buy a Nook e-reader. I’d been setting money aside for it — okay, I’d been setting it aside for a Kindle — but I’ve recently been in a bad accident that’s forced me to take the semester off of work. So, I’ve asked family and friends if they’d be willing to pitch in to collectively buy the Nook as a birthday present. I figure if we can get 13 friends to pitch in 20 dollars each, we’re home. My buddy Kelly Bennett suggested setting up a Paypal donation button for this purpose, so that’s exactly what I did.

I don’t have a slick video pitch like Robin’s for his book, nor do I have anything to offer you — except more blog posts about reading machines. Really, since I wrote this and this, B&N should just send me an offical review copy. However, it seems to be an iron law that nobody sends you anything for free until you are at least thirty years old. So I shall call on friends instead.

NB: This is here purely for folks who wanted to find a way to participate in my birthday present, but didn’t have a better way. Most readers of this blog have never met me, nor do they have any business buying me a birthday present. But, I figure – what the heck. Anything is worth a shot.

Phillip Greenspun argues that technology is reducing the value of older people’s wisdom.

Let’s start by considering factual knowledge. An old person will know more than a young person, but can any person, young or old, know as much as Google and Wikipedia? Why would a young person ask an elder the answer to a fact question that can be solved authoritatively in 10 seconds with a Web search?

How about skills? Want help orienting a rooftop television aerial? Changing the vacuum tubes in your TV? Dialing up AOL? Using MS-DOS? Changing the ribbon on an IBM Selectric (height of 1961 technology)? Tuning up a car that lacks electronic engine controls? Doing your taxes without considering the Alternative Minimum Tax and the tens of thousands of pages of rules that have been added since our senior citizen was starting his career? Didn’t think so.

The same technological progress that enables our society to keep an ever-larger percentage of old folks’ bodies going has simultaneously reduced the value of the minds within those bodies.

Well, fine; if you previously treated your grandparents like the contents of the vintage encyclopedias on their shelves, then you’ve got some new options. But get this: you always could have just read those encyclopedias, too.

Probably no invention diminished the knowledge-retention-value of older people so much as writing. At the same time, writing provided a way for that knowledge to survive death, to reach not only children and grandchildren but great-great-grandchildren and strangers and people in far away places. Likewise, if older folks’ wisdom can be transferred to the internet, then it will actually add value to both their wisdom and the internet. Oh, wait — it already has!

More to the point, Greenspun’s human-hard-drive concept of valuable knowledge is pretty ossified. When I see my grandmother, I don’t ask her about the names of plants or when the best time is to plant certain flowers, even though I know that she (and not I) know this stuff cold. I don’t even (at least always) ask her to sew my split pants seat or loose jacket button, even though she’s the one in the family who’s got the sewing machine and knows how to use it.

Instead, I talk to her about the time when she picked me up from school, and took me to Taco Bell, and the hot meat melted the cheese on the tacos, something I had never seen before, and that we both marveled at. Or I ask her about the book she’s reading, what she thinks of it, her opinions about the characters and the writing. Or I ask her about things that happened before my lifetime, about the Depression, or how she felt when she and my grandfather moved into their house in Detroit — I have the picture of her, nineteen years old with the nineteen-inch waist, doing a cartwheel on the front lawn, but it’s not enough. I listen to her describe how the city was then, and sometimes wince at the sharpness she expresses in her distaste for the city now. She tells me about how difficult it is for her to read now, how she wishes she’d kept taking the shots in her eyes for her glaucoma and macular degeneration. She tells me about my grandfather, who has been gone for fifteen years, whom I knew not nearly as well.

Not all kinds of knowledge are generated at random, of equal factual value to everybody. Sometimes they’re embodied in experience, and specifically relevant only to the people who share them. As Zora Neale Hurston has Janie say in Their Eyes Were Watching God, “you’ve got to go there to know there.”

(Greenspun’s post via Lone Gunman.)

Today is Ezra Pound’s birthday. Born in Hailey, Idaho, raised in Wyncote, PA, son of an assayer at the Philadelphia Mint, Pound became, in turn: a fledgling scholar of Latin, Anglo-Saxon, and Provencal poetry — trying to gather a tradition of verse in the Middle Ages that he believed had eluded both medieval scholars and especially modern poets; then, after he was dismissed from his teaching post at a college in Indiana for the impropriety of having an unmarried woman sleep in his room, a wild-haired, sombrero-clad poet and critic who deliberately set out to shock the genteel chamber-room audiences who would come to hear he and W.B. Yeats declaim their verse; then, a champion of modern writing, shepherding T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, H.D., William Carlos Williams, T.E. Hulme, Robert McAlmon, Louis Zukofsky, Robert Frost, George Oppen, Richard Aldington, and dozens if not hundreds of experimental writers into print; then, a pacifist in opposition to the First World War, who watched his friends, including the impossibly talented sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska (who sculpted Pound’s head, and to whom Pound dedicated a book, titled Gaudier-Brzeska), die.

Pound’s great poem about his young adult life, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’s “Ode Pour L’election De Son Sepulchre,” also happens to be, I think, THE great poem about World War I. Bear with me, because I’m going to quote sections IV and V in full:

IV
These fought in any case,
And some believing,
pro domo, in any case…

Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later…
some in fear, learning love of slaughter;

Died some, pro patria,
non “dulce” not “et decor”…
walked eye-deep in hell
believing old men’s lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.

Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
fair cheeks, and fine bodies;

fortitude as never before

frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.

V
There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,

Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,

For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.

Gaudier-Brzeska had died, along with so many, and Joyce had nearly starved, for a culture that Pound felt no longer deserved them.

Unfortunately, Pound’s growing obsession with “usury age-old and age-thick / and liars in public places” would eventually consume him. He moved to France, writing letters to The Dial about the new experimental writing there, along with photography, architecture, and filmmaking, and eventually to Italy. He wrote extended essays and even a book-length tract on economics, how banks and munitions sellers and the liars who ran newspapers conspired against both the general public and men of real intelligence.

This is why EP is perfect for Matthew Battles and co. at Hilobrow; I can’t think of anyone who was a greater cultural elitist than Pound who simultaneously championed both popular culture (some of his essays on film, especially, are revelatory) and especially the simple lives of ordinary people over and against the economic and political elites who sought to hoodwink and exploit them. Pound’s poetry is rife with this tension. He could almost be called anti-high, anti-low, and anti-middlebrow. I actually think Pound was so influential that this remains today the stance of most poet-intellectuals, especially those who think of themselves as avant-garde.

By the twenties, Pound was already in the middle of producing his long elder poem, The Cantos. Early on, The Cantos sought to serve a function similar to that of Eliot’s “The Waste Land” or Joyce’s Ulysses, reconciling modern life and the new, direct, fragmented writing with classical learning and traditions. Pound in particular was trying to resurrect the epic, but as if Milton had never existed, taking his cues directly from Dante. The poem that would eventually become Canto I (in early drafts, it bats third) is an English translation of part of Andreas Divus’s Latin version of Homer’s Odyssey, transformed into Anglo-Saxon alliterative incantations and trochaic rhythms:

And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, so winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,
Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.

So far, we’re pretty close to the text, reanimating something of the spirit of Homer (which Pound felt Divus understood, but had been lost in previous English translations). The end, though, breaks the fourth wall:

Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus,
In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer.
And he sailed, by Sirens and thence outward and away
And unto Circe.
Venerandam,
In the Creatan’s phrase, with the golden crown, Aphrodite,
Cypri munimenta sortita est, mirthful, orichalchi, with golden
Girdles and breast bands, thou with dark eyelids
Bearing the golden bough of Argicida. So that:

In rapid succession, we get a bibliographic aside, a return to translation, untranslated Latin texts, a final evocative image, and a transition that terminates in medias res. The poet who could write perfect pastiches of a dozen polished literary forms decides instead to snap them off and show you their jagged edges.

This is the way Pound tried to rediscover the epic, the form that he characterized as “a poem including history.” Pound wanted to literally include history — facts and people and places, and above all WRITING. He dug through archive stacks in Italy to find original material on Sigismondo Malatesta, a relatively unknown 16th-century Italian nobleman/general who briefly became the hero of Pound’s poem, and incorporated them wholesale into his verse. He did the same with letters between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, materials that he thought showed the corruption of the American democratic project (through the secret machinations of usurious bankers and politicians, naturally) while it was still in its infancy. For an alternative to the “old bitch gone in the teeth,” he looked to Asia, above all to Confucius and Japanese poetry and drama. Wealthy nobleman with an austere, humanist philosophy, a solid record of artistic patronage, and a flair for theatricality — for Pound, these were the perfect models.

In the 1930s, Pound’s paranoid method reached its summit. His politics were always contrary, and radical. After a brief flirtation with Lenin — which came to an end partly because of Stalin’s repression of poets and partly because EP felt that all Marxists fundamentally misunderstood the nature of money — Pound became a firm supporter of Mussolini and Italian fascism. Mussolini had his faults — but western democracy was a sham (WWI had proved that) and Mussolini liked and supported artists. Short of actually recreating the Italian renaissance or feudal China, Pound would take what he could get.

Pound’s fascism was simultaneously world-historical and deeply local. When he first came to Italy in the twenties, his innkeeper, who was a member of the Fascist party, intervened with the local bureaucrats who had denied Pound access to the Malatesta archives. These were men of action, who knew how to cut through red tape! Particularly for someone as obviously worthy as Pound himself! He met Mussolini and read some of his poetry aloud, in his famous faux-bardic sing-speech style (which was itself a pastiche of Yeats). “Very entertaining,” said Il Duce; Pound convinced himself that this was exactly the appropriate response.

As World War II approached, the Pounds grew nervous. They were classified as resident enemy aliens by the Italian government .Pound even sought asylum in the US or UK, but there was a problem. Pound’s wife, Dorothy Shakespear, was a British citizen, while he was not; what’s more, his lover and longtime companion, the violinist Olga Rudge, would not have been allowed to travel with the Pounds, nor would Pound’s and Rudge’s daughter Mary. (Dorothy had a son, Omar Pound, who was almost certainly not Ezra’s biological son, but that’s another story.) Nor would either country let Dorothy, Olga, or Mary travel without Ezra. Once again, bureaucracy had foiled him.

Pound then did something extraordinarily stupid. Instead of privately grumbling about the stupidity of his government, he took advantage of an invitation to broadcast his views on the radio. For the Italians, there was a clear propaganda value in having a prominent American writer denouncing the American invasion. For Pound, there was the illusion that he was taking real political action, and an audience in front of which he could perform. The broadcasts are a mess; Pound’s brain was always faster than his linguistic skills, and his Italian would slip, juxtaposed with long passages in English where he would perform in different dialects, as different characters — as if he were Orson Welles doing voices for a radio show. He would read poetry and rant about money and bankers and, increasingly, Jews. After the Americans had successfully invaded and captured Italy, Pound buried copies of his books in a neighbor’s yard. Then the American army arrested him for treason.

Pound was kept in a makeshift cell — really, a cage — along with various military prisoners, in Pisa, Italy. Some of them were captured officers in the Italian army, while others were American soldiers, mostly deserters. Pound, as an American traitor who had been collaborating with the Italian government, split the difference between the two. He was only able to keep with him a few possessions — a Chinese dictionary, and some notes he had been preparing for new Cantos.

But first, he had a different project. He felt his sanity slipping away. He had to understand what had happened to him — what had happened to everyone caught in the hairpin failure of European politics and culture. And he was legitimately afraid that at any time, he could be tried, convicted, and summarily hanged. He wanted to write down everything he knew, anything he could remember. Somehow he secured a pen; the first drafts of what would become The Pisan Cantos were written on toilet paper.

As he’d slipped into paranoia and prejudice, the Cantos themselves increasingly appeared to be a failed project. The Pisan Cantos redeems it. Instead of a failed epic about heroism, it becomes a heroic epic of failure — in particular, Pound’s failure. Freed from his archived arguments over the First Bank of the United States, Pound is able to reach deeper, into the archives of his memory, uncovering the piths and gists of Greek myths, Confucius, Ovid, and Dante — but also his physical memories of villages he had seen, women he had loved, stories Eliot told, songs Joyce would sing, jokes William Carlos Williams told him while they were still in college together at Penn. It’s a multi-vocal piece, almost a canon, where multiple threads overlap and intersect. Sometimes the strands are cued by simple graphic clues, indentation or stanza breaks, but more often left for the reader to disentangle (my quotes below lose some of this typographic subtlety — silly HTML). You read, and watch a man who is simultaneously at the height of his writerly virtuosity, and physically and mentally falling apart — and registering that he is doing so.

The most heartbreaking is Canto LXXXI. This is its conclusion.

What thou lovest well remains,
the rest is dross
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage
Whose world, or mine or theirs
or is it of none?
First came the seen, then thus the palpable
Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell,
What thou lovest well is thy true heritage
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee

The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world.
Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made grace,
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.
Learn of the green world what can be thy place
In scaled invention or true artistry,
Pull down thy vanity,
Paquin pull down!
The green casque has outdone your elegance.

“Master thyself, then others shall thee beare”
Pull down thy vanity
Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail,
A swollen magpie in a fitful sun,
Half black half white
Nor knowst’ou wing from tail
Pull down thy vanity
How mean thy hates
Fostered in falsity,
Pull down thy vanity,
Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity,
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.

But to have done instead of not doing
This is not vanity
To have, with decency, knocked
That a Blunt should open
To have gathered from the air a live tradition
or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame
this is not vanity.
Here error is all in the not done,
all in the diffidence that faltered . . .

In order to avoid hanging or prison, Pound was committed to the St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital in New Jersey. There he was visited by writers, both old friends and young aspirants. Despite the end to which he seemed to come, Pound’s relentless experimentation, his championing of other writers, and above all his writings made him a hero and model to poets of the younger generation. To one of these, a young Allen Ginsberg, Pound confessed: “My worst mistake was that stupid suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.” He’d largely exasperated and embarassed his modernist contemporaries, who were willing to speak for his freedom but otherwise wanted little to do with him. For other poets, less young or radical, especially those who were politically moderate to liberal but conservative in their writing, Pound confirmed both the political dangers and inherent aesthetic insanity of modernist writing. The Pisan Cantos, on publication, would win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1948 — a scandal, even for such an undeniable book. It was the last great literary work of Anglo-American high modernism; within a year, a Poundian poet named Charles Olson would begin using the word “postmodern” to name what was on its way, in poetry, the arts, and the broader culture.

Pound himself lived until November 1, 1972 — just two days after his 87th birthday. For long stretches, he would not speak, only write. He even returned to Italy, to live with his daughter Mary, who had married Prince Boris de Rachewiltz. Mary’s mother Olga Rudge, the love of Pound’s life, lived with them, too, caring for Ezra and working as his secretary. She died in 1996, 100 years old. Mary, still living, helped secure Pound’s papers, which are now at the Beinecke Library at Yale University; she remains very much the keeper of the Pound legacy. Which is enormous — there’s a reason why former dean of modernist scholars Hugh Kenner titled his best book The Pound Era.

Happy birthday, Ezra. For all of your faults, which were real and deep, you gathered a live tradition from the air, and returned it to us. And that is not vanity.

Noted layabout Jason Kottke writes about one of the unexpected virtues of the iPhone; it’s easy to use with one hand.

People carry things. Coffee, shopping bags, books, bags, babies, small dogs, hot dogs, water bottles, coats, etc. It’s nice to be able to not put all that crap down just to quickly Google for the closest public restroom (aka Starbucks)…

My wife spends about five hours a day breastfeeding our daughter and has only one hand available for non-feeding activities. That hand is frequently occupied by her iPhone; it helps her keep abreast (hey’o!) of current events, stay connected with pals through Twitter & email, track feeding/sleeping/diaper changing times, keep notes (she plans meals and grocery “shops” at 3am), and alert her layabout husband via SMS to come and get the damned baby already.

I think it’s fairly easy to dial and answer any cell phone with one hand. It’s the fact that you can almost perfectly use smartphone functions with a single hand that set the iPhone apart. I used to have a Blackberry Bold — it bit the dust around the same time my arm did — and while I really liked a lot of things about the hardware, you really couldn’t use it well with one hand. In particular, the virtues of fast thumb-typing on a mechanical QWERTY keyboard seem a lot smaller when that particular grip is impossible for you to pull off.

Now I’ve got an iPhone, and the ability to use the thing one-handed is one of several features that makes it the perfect phone for me. (Let me also say, after my venture into Blackberry land — if you primarily use a Mac, it’s silly to have another smartphone. If you’re on Windows, do what you feel.)

Jason mentions my recently broken arm in his post, along with a tweet I wrote: “They should have an ad — ‘If you’ve got a broken arm, this is the perfect phone for you!'” Jason also points out that many folks have disabilities more permanent than mine which make it hard for them to use both arms/hands; this observation really touches me, since I have a relative with a congenital upper limb difference whose left hand is prosthetic. Also, several of my good friends from rehab have had spinal injuries that greatly limit the full use of their limbs.

Generally, I would say that while I was actually pretty conscious of accessibility issues before my injury, I have a completely different understanding of it now, as I’m navigating the world in a wheelchair, trying to both capture and manage the attention of random passers-by, totally aware of just how much function I have, and that (unlike my friends) I’ll be hanging up the wheelchair in just a few weeks. (Rehabbing the arm will take a while longer.) Your cheerfulness about the situation varies almost directly with your autonomy — and the iPhone is GREAT at making you feel autonomous. Innovation in interface design isn’t just about creating a cooler experience. It’s about giving more and more people a shot at that experience to begin with.

Last week, Ta-Nehisi Coates posted a video of R&B singer Jerry Butler, who was also called “The Iceman.” “He is, bar none, my favorite singer ever,” TNC wrote. And: “My Moms loved Jerry Butler. Hearing him softly murder this classic [“Your Precious Love”] reminds me of sitting in the passenger seat of her silver Volkswagen Rabbit.”

I don’t have any comparable childhood associations with TNC’s writing. But gosh — there are few people writing today who can just absolutely gut you the way he can. I think “Iceman” should be Ta-Nehisi’s new nickname.

See it:

Incredible journalism is like incredible baby-making–it starts with passion. The guy combing through the city budgets because it’s his job, isn’t the same as the guy combing through them because it keeps him up at night, because he thinks about it when he shouldn’t be. Institutions support that passion–but they don’t create it. When my old Howard buddy was killed by the cops, it was all I could think about, and it was all I wanted to write about. And I did it almost for free, because it helped me sleep at night. I was burning to get it down. I deeply suspect that the bloggers you love, and the reporters you love, are similarly on fire inside.

I don’t have a strict allegiance to “journalism,” as much as I have one to the written word. Perhaps there’s no difference. But my point is that to the extent blogging makes it possible for more people who are “on fire” to employ the written word, than it’s good for the written word. It’s true that it creates a situation in which anyone, for $15 a month, can say their piece. But I have more faith in the market of ideas, than in a brain-trust of editors, to separate the wheat from the chafe.

Moreover, while there are an incredible number of bloggers out there, with no institutional support, who suck. There are a truly shocking number of writers, who have all the institutional support in the world, and not only suck, but bring nothing save cynicism, incuriousity, and cold poisoned hearts. And the institutions enable them. To the extent that blogging exposes these frauds, I am all in.

When it came out that NASA was going to shoot some rockets into the moon so they could see what would happen, I immediately thought of this classic sketch from Mr Show with Bob and David:

The obvious climax of the sketch is when Galileo the monkey wisely asks the scientists who plan to destroy the moon, “Why? Why do you want to blow up the moon?” Of course, NASA quickly replaces Galileo with a circus monkey who doesn’t know sign language, “who will do the job, no questions asked.”

Yesterday, commenter Ami Marie probably felt a little like Galileo:

Why am I reminded of the fat people in the movie Wall E when I read about this electronic book stuff??? Is there some thing wrong with an actual book? Other than that nasty paper wasting thing, and the toxic ink, oh yeah.…the list goes on. But isn’t a Kindle or a Nook going to end up in a landfill too when the newest, latest and greatest gadget hits the scene???? So I guess turning into a blob staring at a TV screen is our future.….nevermind!!!

“Is there something wrong with an actual book?” This is a serious question, and deserves a serious response.

For my part, obviously, the answer is no. As I wrote in my reply comment:

Hey, look: here at Snark­market, we love printed books so much, we made one our selves. We love them so much, we write love let ters to 16th-century Venetian print ers. I love books so much that when I broke my arm and couldn’t hold onto a heavy paperback with two hands, I cried.

I’ll expand: I’m a PhD in Comparative Literature and a postdoctoral fellow who teaches freshman how to write about literature, philosophy, and science. I teach a class called “From Scroll to Screen: The History and Theory of Writing.” I insist for this class that my students BUY THE BOOKS, and bristle at any suggestion that the books cost too much or pose too much of a physical burden. I study the history of the book (and of other material texts) and write papers and attend conferences on the same. I wrote my dissertation on something I call “Paper Modernism.”

But books just aren’t my professional life; they’re my life. As I say routinely, books are my drug of choice. I can’t imagine living without them.

But I don’t feel entirely like Galileo the monkey. I’m full-on into new media too; I teach cinema and media studies ALONG WITH books and newspapers — part of my thesis argues that we actually can’t entirely separate these media streams from one another, because they’re created and circulated and especially EXPERIENCED together, not identically, but as part of a total media system. And I have become, somewhat surprisingly, a computer person: a blogger and blogreader who totes around a laptop and smartphone. Just as I can’t imagine my life without books, I can’t imagine it without screens either.

Part of what we do at Snarkmarket — as screen people talking largely to other screen people — is to chart and celebrate and critique screen culture, and above all, to try to figure out where it’s going. I think we do this in a way that’s reflective and ethical, understanding that every technological change is in turn an anthropological change, one that both says something about and directly informs our fundamental values.

And yet — on something like electronic readers, where it’s so easy to ooh and aah at the new tech, or to snipe on janky designs or “old-media” people who “don’t get it” — I don’t want to be Koko the monkey either, mindlessly cheering the scientists on as they blow up the moon! Let me say that I don’t think we will ever totally lose books, or print — but even the loss of influence that the printed word that we’ve seen over the last century has been a genuine loss.

More precisely: there are people, and industries, and experiences, that HAVE LOST; that will CONTINUE TO LOSE; and this will be because digital media will gain in influence, partly at print’s expense. Anyone doubting this, or expecting otherwise, is like Mitt Romney telling voters in Michigan that if they keep working hard enough, the industrial jobs will come back. An era is passing. We have to treat it accordingly.

So. Why reading machines?

1. Because readers are already there. We are already reading more on electronic devices, on screens ranging from TV to computer to cellular phone. What’s more, while book-reading and newspaper and magazine subscriptions are down across the country (and across the world), electronic reading is GROWING. It’s growing in share, it’s growing in readers, and it’s growing in influence. If you are in a reading-intensive business, you want to get your content on a screen, because that’s where the readers are, and will be in the future.

Dedicated e-book readers have emerged because booksellers couldn’t get into that market, onto those screens. First and foremost, there was no real marketplace. And, there are several things about both computers (in any form factor) and smartphones that make them less than ideal for long-form reading. Readers needed a device, and they needed a store; Amazon wasn’t the first to offer both, but like the iPod before it, the Kindle was the first such device and store to be taken seriously, even as its total numbers haven’t exactly set the world on fire. Barnes and Noble saw a different way to approach the same market, and created a device and a software and store model to take advantage of it. But essentially, even as they’re inticing old readers in, booksellers and publishers are playing catch-up to the rest of the reading market.

2. Because otherwise publishers may not survive. It’s ironic that booksellers, especially online booksellers, have done so much to push e-reading, because they’ve already solved the problems of storage and circulation of material, discovering the long tail of content, etc. Electronic books are just one more step in Amazon’s reconstruction of retail — but they would have been okay anyways.

Really, it’s publishers who are screwed. Paper and printing costs, plus the expense of storage and transfer and delivery, are killing publishers — in books, magazines, journals, and newspapers. They can either raise prices or cut standards or go completely exclusive, high-end, luxury — and watch their market shrink even further — or turn to electronic delivery as the last best way to cut that knot. If we want to continue to have inexpensive books, news, commentary, and entertainment, we as readers and producers of media have to embrace digital delivery. The status quo is unsustainable.

3. This one is a little more metaphysical, but: Something has to be next. Our current forms of media, and our current interfaces for them, are exhausting themselves. Much of this is purely economic. But it’s also ideological and cultural. If books and newspapers and magazines and movies and television and radio and even blogs and web pages have slowly but inexorably calcified — and I think the signs are good to suggest that they have — then something has to happen next. Or, we resign ourselves to it, playing out the string, until elderly people die off, and the kids forget that there was such a thing as vitality in culture.

That’s when you wind up in the Wall-E universe, Ami Marie; when we forget that we can change things, when we stop exploring.

Let me return to something I wrote a few months ago, about the surprising rekindling (no pun intended) of literacy in the digital age:

As recently as 2000, it seemed inevitable that any minute now, we were going to be able to turn in our quaint keyboards and start controlling computers with our voice. Our comput­ers were going to become just like our telephones, or even better, like our secretaries. But while voice and speech recognition and commands have gotten a lot better, generally the trend has been in the other direction — instead of talking to our computers, we’re typing on our phones…

The return to speech, in all of its imme­diacy, after centuries of the technologi­cal dominance of writing, seemed inevitable. Film, radio, television, and the phonograph all seemed to point towards a future dominated by communication technologies where writing and reading played an increasingly dimin­ished role. I think the most important development, though, was probably the telephone. Ordinary speech, conversa­tion, in real-time, where space itself appeared to vanish. It created a para­digm not just for media theorists and imaginative futurists but for ordinary people to imagine tomorrow…

This is where most of the futurists got it wrong — the impact of radio, television, and the telephone weren’t going to be solely or even primarily on more and more speech, but, for technical or cul­tural or who-knows-exactly-what reasons, on writing! We didn’t give up writ­ing — we put it in our pockets, took it out side, blended it with sound, pictures, and video, and sent it over radio waves so we could “talk” to our friends in real-time. And we used those same radio waves to download books and newspa­pers and everything else to our screens so we would have something to talk about.

This is the thing about literacy today, that needs above all not to be misun­derstood. Both the people who say that reading/writing have declined and that reading/writing are stronger than ever are right, and wrong. It’s not a return to the word, unchanged. It’s a literacy transformed by the existence of the electronic media that it initially has nothing in common with. It’s also trans­formed by all the textual forms — mail, the newspaper, the book, the bulletin board, etc. It’s not purely one thing or another.

The word is transforming, and being transformed. If you wanted to stick your hand in the dike, to stop what is happening to the book, you need to go back a century or more.

For my part, I find myself continually grateful for and delighted by what is happening, because while reading in some individual media is falling off, reading as such is actually flourishing. As I tweeted a week ago:

The revelation of the present isn’t that the printed word is in decline; it’s that reading and writing haven’t been destroyed along with it.

It is to keep reading and writing alive, and to keep them innovative, reflective, and exploratory, that I do everything — let me say it again, EVERYTHING — that I do.

To every reader of Snarkmarket, let me say: thank you for letting me do it here; and above all, for doing it with me.

Umair Haque bangs the drum:

Socially useless business is what has created a global economy on life support. Socially useless business is what has created a jobless “recovery” and mass unemployment amongst the young. Socially useless business is why we don’t have a better education, healthcare, finance, energy, transportation, or media industry. Socially useless business is a culture in shock, reeling from assault after assault on the fabric of community and comity. Socially useless business is the status quo — and the status quo says: “You don’t matter. Our bottom line is the only thing that matters.”

Until now. Today, socially useless businesses are living on borrowed time — and the clock’s about to reach zero hour. Somewhere out there is a Constructive Capitalist who’s going to use the power of meaningful economics to relegate you to the dustbin of economic history — just like Google and Apple are doing to big media, Wal-Mart’s doing to big food, FMCG, and retail, and Nike’s doing to shoes.

So far, so good; smart, critical, visionary. Probably even true.

But then, Haque pulls out a lighting bolt of an analogy to remind us that he’s a young guy who’s writing a blog, not a stuffy magazine writer proffering an op-ed:

Here are four different paths to becoming a socially useless supervillain:

Skeletor. Skeletor’s goal was to learn Eternia’s time-honored secrets, and use them against Eternia itself. Sound familiar? It should. It’s what telcos, pharma players, health insurers, and automakers do when they lobby against the common good — and for a license to be socially useless. The secrets of Eternia were the key to its prosperity, just like laws that protect the common good are the key to ours. Yet GM was lobbying against higher mileage standards until this year, right up until their bankruptcy. That’s about as brain-dead as Skeletor trying to take on He-Man, over and over again — and never winning.

Gargamel. Gargamel isn’t really a supervillain — just an evil old dude with the ability to create magic potions. He wants to destroy the Smurfs because he thinks he knows how to run a better Smurf society. Sound familiar? It’s the economic equivalent of financial engineering. Private equity funds are textbook examples: their magic potions never seem to work very well. Though the companies they run may benefit in the near-term, eventually, they run iconic companies into the ground. Think of the sad story of Simmons — the focus of seven deals in 18 years. Today its debt load is ten times what it was two decades ago. Yet from the merry-go-round of private equity owners, no authentic value has been created.

Also mentioned: Wile E Coyote and Cobra Commander. Awesome.

One thing I want to add: “constructive capitalists” (not a bad term) find ways not only to generate qualitative value, but to realize it. This is why smaller businesses have so much to offer, to their owners, their workers, and their customers: they’re less concerned with extracting value to pass up the chain (to shareholders, parent companies, etc.) then with realizing it by creating great products, treating people with respect, offering humane policies, job flexibility, mentorship, etc.

You can forego maximizing profit if you can realize some of these qualitative benefits. It’s impossible for someone trading your stock to realize those qualitative benefits. It’s not that a shareholder is economically rational while a self-employed business owner isn’t — it’s that in each position, only certain kinds of economic decision-making are even possible.

Instead of buying and cooking and eating a meal — where at every step you’re balancing qualitative and quantitative value — it’s like buying a gallon of gasoline: who cares, really, how good it is? I just need a full tank at the best price. I don’t know about you, but cooking a great meal isn’t just more socially valuable — it’s more personally valuable too, because all of that qualitative goodness ends up on our tongues and in our bellies.

At New Geography, Aaron Renn takes a Kotkinesque shot at the darlings of urban planners and bike-toting social climbers everywhere:

If you take away the dominant Tier One cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles you will find that the “progressive” cities [e.g. Portland, Seattle, Austin, Minneapolis, and Denver] aren’t red or blue, but another color entirely: white.

In fact, not one of these “progressive” cities even reaches the national average for African American percentage population in its core county. Perhaps not progressiveness but whiteness is the defining characteristic of the group…

As the college educated flock to these progressive El Dorados, many factors are cited as reasons: transit systems, density, bike lanes, walkable communities, robust art and cultural scenes. But another way to look at it is simply as White Flight writ large. Why move to the suburbs of your stodgy Midwest city to escape African Americans and get criticized for it when you can move to Portland and actually be praised as progressive, urban and hip? Many of the policies of Portland are not that dissimilar from those of upscale suburbs in their effects. Urban growth boundaries and other mechanisms raise land prices and render housing less affordable exactly the same as large lot zoning and building codes that mandate brick and other expensive materials do. They both contribute to reducing housing affordability for historically disadvantaged communities. Just like the most exclusive suburbs.

It’s worth reading the whole thing, but I want to propose an alternate hypothesis.

This is something I think about a lot, not least because I’m an aspiring college professor married to an urban planning student who is also a black lady. Who doesn’t drive. And we have kids.

How can we find someplace to live that’s 1) safe, 2) planning-progressive, 3) politically progressive, 4) with good schools, 5) with some good jobs — and where my wife and our children won’t be the only middle-class African-Americans most people in our neighborhoods ever see?

It’s a harder nut to crack than you’d think, not least because my wife is probably keener on places like Portland than I am. I grew up in Detroit, and like big cities that are sometimes a little seedy: Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, San Francisco, Boston. My wife grew up in D.C., but then moved to semi-rural Georgia (where her family WERE the only middle-class blacks her neighbors had ever seen).

We both love cities. But she doesn’t drive a car, and I don’t ride a bike. There we are.

Now here’s the thing. Why do these little model cities not have very many black people?

It’s worth asking: why do some places have relatively high concentrations of African-Americans? The answer, historically, has been: 1) they are in the South, or 2) they are large, industrial cities that attracted lots of black men and women during the industrial migrations of the first half of this century.

Now, if a city didn’t have a big industrial base forty years ago, it probably didn’t (and don’t) have a big African-American population.

And – if it didn’t commit head-over-heels to industry, it’s probably in better shape now than most of the cities that did.

Hence Renn’s correlation is a classic example of what the statisticians call a missing variable problem. That missing variable is relative industrialization, which drives both the size of the Af-Am population and whether a city is a small-town, new-urbanist model or a post-industrial hellhole. (Sorry, Detroit.)

Let me add too: if a city is a really, really desirable place to live, then it will be expensive. If a city is expensive, then it will largely attract either wealthy adults or young people, students, etc. who are willing to live in small apartments on the cheap. You don’t get a lot of families with four or more kids, and – given the relative income and wealth distribution in this country – you don’t get a lot of black people.

NOW. This doesn’t account for cities like San Francisco, where a once-substantial black population has essentially been driven (and then priced) out.

It doesn’t explain why young black professionals are way, way more likely to move to New York or Atlanta than Portland.

It also doesn’t negate Renn’s observation that one of the things that may attract wealthy and high-climbing whites to cities like Portland is their low black population and relative lack of “urban problems.” It may be a kind of socially-acceptable white flight for greenie liberals. But that’s not anything you can blame on the cities. If it’s true, it’s in the psychology of their residents.

Matt’s looking at how the internet is changing churches; Mark Bittman looks at how the internet ought to be changing the real spiritual center of most neighborhoods today, the grocery store.

The one time I tried shopping online I was sent a free watermelon — how does that happen? — but that didn’t make up for the even-less-than-supermarket quality of the food. This is my fantasy about virtual grocery shopping: that you could ask and be told the provenance and ingredients of any product you look at in your Web browser. You could specify, for example, “wild, never-frozen seafood” or “organic, local broccoli.”

You could also immortalize your preferences (“Never show me anything whose carbon footprint is bigger than that of my car”; “Show me no animals raised in cages”; “Don’t show me vegetables grown more than a thousand miles from my home”), along with any and all of your cooking quirks (“When I buy chicken, ask me if I want rosemary”). You would receive, if you wanted, an e-mail message when shipments of your favorite foods arrived at the store or went on sale; you could get recipe ideas, serving suggestions, shopping lists, nutritional information and cooking videos. If poor-quality food arrived — yellowing broccoli, stinky fish, whatever — you would receive store credit without any hassle. You might even, I suppose, be able to ask the store to limit the amount of impulse purchases that you make — forget that second pint of Ben & Jerry’s or those Cheez-Its you have trouble resisting.

These are services I’d be willing to pay for. And suppose this online grocer also sold precut or preseasoned vegetables, meat, fish and so on that were made with high-quality ingredients. (Surely I’m not alone in believing that the worst carrots are selected to be formed into “baby” carrots or that premarinated meats feature not only inferior meats but also inferior seasonings.) Maybe I could order my precut broccoli to be parboiled for two minutes, shocked, tossed with slivered garlic and packaged with a lemon. It would be ready for me to refrigerate until I’m ready to eat, and then, in five minutes, I could sauté, dress and put it on the table.

Gosh. True personalization in online retail really is the holy grail, isn’t it? Everyone wants it. We think it should be easy, that it’s right around the corner — but nobody never quite gets there.

No corporation big enough to pull off an operation like online grocery shopping is nimble enough to actually pay special attention to you as a person. It seems like online shopping can give you personalization roughly up to the level where you can pick one of five choices. Also, 50-60% of the time, at least two of them will be unavailable. Even with something like Amazon, which has a pretty sophisticated recommendation engine, I often find myself chastising it, like an unfavored lover: “sometimes I think that you don’t know me at all.”

As for complex operations like Bittman’s parboiled broccoli with garlic — which admittedly sounds delicious — if you can’t get either your grocery’s butcher or your favorite chef to tailor your order that precisely, you’re never going to get a drop-down menu to do it.

Some of these other ideas are great – but when it comes to the cooking, unless we’re willing to take what the supermarket’s serving, we’re on our own.

We talk about college, we talk about media, we talk about industries in general, now here’s an interesting window into the church. Because of course, if everyone else is coping with the consequences of the digitization of aspects of their worlds, why should the clergy be exempt?

Televangelism has been around much longer than I have. But it remains a very particular type of worship, looked upon by old-school churchgoers as lowbrow, lazy, sensationalistic, stuffed with cheap visual thrills. In other words, they regard it much the same way “serious” media consumers tend to regard television generally.

Digivangelism, on the other hand, could be something altogether different. Much like the rest of the Internet, it can go in two directions – more vulgar and shallow than the worst televised atrocity, or even more genuine and fervent than the communal physical worship experience. In his essay, “In Defense of Virtual Church,” Pastor Douglas Estes is clearly aiming for the latter, but seems to strike many believers in the comments as merely making a case for the former.

Estes specializes in one manifestation of the virtual church, perhaps the most obvious. As far as I can tell, he’s most concerned with the concept of church in virtual worlds (like Second Life), which I find a little disappointing. But he’s acquired at least one really thoughtful critic, who’s promising to take on these ideas in a four-part series called “In Defense of Physical Community.” As you might expect, Nicholas Carr gets name-dropped in part one, but I have high hopes he’ll go beyond that in parts two through four:

• The Cultural Implications of the Internet
• The Physical Limitations of the Internet
• The Ecclesiological and Scriptural Implications of Online Church

I think this is a fascinating conversation. It’s another front in the high-church/low-church wars that are still raging over the Internet and its effects on our culture. But this time it’s actually about church! When people refer to old-school journalists as a “priesthood,” they’re employing a droll metaphor. In this context, when someone talks about the priesthood, they’re for real.

The Catholic in me – the boy who led his high school’s worship team, who carried around a copy of the Catechism to reference in doctrinal debates – is also dying to see how this turns out. I can imagine a journalism that consistently uses the best aspects of the Web to deliver a deeper understanding than any form of journalism we’ve seen to date. And I can sort of squint my eyes and picture a spiritual experience online that stirred me more than the scent of wood and holy water, the thumbing of an ashen cross onto my forehead, a whispered “Peace be with you.” I’ve had spiritual experiences online before, but I’ve never seen what I would call an online church. For a lover of the Internet and its potential, the possibility is deeply exciting.