JoAnne McNeil:

Publishers need to act like… record labels.

Say it again.

If there were a Tony Wilson of publishing, you bet I would buy every book printed, (disposable income permitting.)

Think about how true that feels. And think about how few institutions or mechanisms there are that create a sense of trust or of identity in book publishing – especially in the wide-open, nobody-knows anything world of mainstream fiction and nonfiction.

Four excerpts of Romanian Nobel laureate Herta Müller on the ontology of bad data:

1. For me each journey to Romania is also a journey into another time, in which I never knew which events in my life were coincidence and which were staged. This is why I have, in every public statement I have made, demanded access to the secret files kept on me which, under various pretexts, have invariably been denied me. Instead there is evidence that I am still under observation…

2. The three years at the tractor factory Tehnometal where I was a translator are missing. I translated the manuals for machines imported from the GDR, Austria and Switzerland. In the third year a “protocol office” was established. I had to be made suitable for the office by means of two recruitment tests carried out by the secret service officer Stana. After the second refusal, his goodbye was: “You’ll be sorry; we’ll drown you in the river.” One morning when I turned up for work, my dictionaries were lying on the floor outside the office door. My place now belonged to an engineer, I was no longer allowed in the office. I couldn’t go home, they would have sacked me there and then. Now I had no table, no chair. For two days, defiant, I sat my eight hours with the dictionaries on a concrete staircase between the ground and first floors, trying to translate so that no one could say I didn’t work. The office staff walked past me, silent…

3. In October 1984 I really was allowed to travel. The intention, however, was malicious: I was to be seen as profiteering from the regime and, in the west, to be suspected of being an agent. The secret service worked intensely on both, but in particular on the “agent” persona. Spying staff were sent to Germany with the task of smearing. The plan of action of 1 July 1985, states with satisfaction: “As a result of several journeys abroad, the idea was launched among some actors at the German State Theatre in Timisoara that Cristina is an agent for the Romanian Securitate.” After my emigration, the measures to “compromise and isolate” were intensified. A “Nota de analiza” from March 1989 reads: “In the action to compromise her, we will work with Branch D (Disinformation), publishing articles abroad or sending memoranda – as if issued by German emigration – to several circles and authorities wielding influence in Germany.”

4. In my file I am two different persons. One is called Cristina, who is an enemy of the state and is being fought. To compromise this Cristina a dummy is produced in the falsification workshop of Branch “D” (Disinformation), with all the ingredients that harm me the most – party faithful communist, unscrupulous agent. Wherever I went, I had to live with this dummy. It wasn’t just sent after me, it hurried ahead of me. Even though I have, from the beginning and always, written only against the dictatorship, the dummy goes its own way to this day. It has become independent of me. Even though the dictatorship has been dead for 20 years, the dummy leads its ghostly life. For how long yet?

For more on the history of files, secret police, and identity, see Cornelia Vismann’s magnificent book Akten, translated last year as Files: Law and Media Technology.

Just before the Nobel nominees were submitted, January 22, 2009, “Obama orders Guantanamo Bay closed, bans torture”:

With a few strokes of a pen, President Obama this morning reversed linchpins of the Bush administration’s war on terror.

He signed executive orders to shut down the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention center within a year and to ban harsh interrogations — what critics say are tantamount to torture .

Obama signed the orders after meeting with 16 retired military officers, who he said pleaded with him to stand up for human rights and American values in combatting terrorism.

“They made an extraordinary impression on me,” said Obama, as they stood behind him and applauded.

After signing the orders, Obama said, “the message we are sending around the world is that the United States intends to prosecute the ongoing struggle against violence and terrorism, and we are going to do so vigilantly; we are going to do so effectively; and we are going to do so in a manner that is consistent with our values and our ideals.”

“We think that it is precisely our ideals that give us the strength and the moral high ground to be able to effectively deal with the unthinking violence that we see emanating from terrorist organizations around the world,” he said. “We intend to win this fight. We’re going to win it on our terms.”

I wish George W. Bush had issued the same executive orders two years earlier. I wish there were a group of in-Iraqi statesmen, real Willie Brandts, who had sought reconciliation or had even hammered out a revenue-sharing and peace agreement to bring real security to Iraq. I wish Guantanamo were still on track to be closed within the year.

We should take seriously Obama’s idea that this isn’t “a recognition of my own accomplishments, but rather as an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations.” It’s not an award for Barack Obama, but for Obama’s transformation of the office of President of the United States.

But let’s be honest with ourselves here. This is about an American President reversing awful, inhumane, war-promoting policies that no American government should ever have allowed, let alone endorsed. We’re Kissinger, here, or Arafat: murderers, criminals, who have astonished the world by taking the tiniest steps in the opposite direction.

Howard Dean sees the political (and immediate) benefits of a public-option-plus*:

{Dean} also warned that the public option may hurt Democrats politically next year. “If the Democrats want to hold on to their majority, you’re going to have a problem,” he said. That’s because the public option wouldn’t be up and running until 2013, long after the 2010 elections, meaning voters won’t really see any benefits until long after the election.

To address that problem, Dean said Democrats need to do something that will have tangible results by next summer. His proposal: opening up Medicare to people over the age of 50 so that a “certain mass” of people will already have benefited from health reform by the elections. “You need to have people sign up for this program by July 2010,” Dean said.

Why not make it kids and Medicaid instead? Under 13, or 18? If you lose your job, your kids don’t lose their health care. And if you have an employee base full of parents w/ lots of dependents, you just saved some money.

Consider a few things that are colliding, at this moment, in my brain.

Warm-up number one: The writer Michael C. Milligan is writing a novel in three days. Just as interestingly—maybe even more interestingly—Eli James over at Novelr is live-blogging the process. It starts on Tuesday.

Warm-up number two: If I get to $10,000 over at Kickstarter (I’m $76 away!) I’m going to write an entire short story on my flight to New York on Tuesday.

Warm-up number three: Alain de Botton as Heathrow’s writer-in-residence. You see him stalking the terminal, taking notes.

All together, these set up this sort of writing-as-performance vibe. The text alone is not the thing.

Now, here’s what’s really got me thinking: Google Wave has a playback feature. EtherPad‘s got it, too. This takes wiki-style document versioning a step further, or maybe a million steps further. It’s so much more granular! It goes keystroke by keystroke and attaches a time-stamp to each one. It records and recreates not just words and spaces, but confidence and hesitation.

So, skip past the obvious notion of playing back the creation of a standard short story or a novel. That’s fine; it makes me shiver, but it’s fine.

Think instead of a short story written with playback in mind. Written for playback. Typing speed and rhythm are part of the experience. Dramatic deletions are part of the story. The text at 2:20 tells you something about the text at 11:13, and vice versa. What appear at first to be tiny, tentative revisions turn out to be precisely-engineered signals. At 5:15 and paragraph five, the author switches a character’s gender, triggering a chain reaction of edits in the preceding grafs, some of which have interesting (and pre-planned?) side effects.

Talk about intertextuality.

I’m sure there are arty precedents (and if you know of any, I’d love to hear about them). But this feels like an interesting moment, simply because these are tools with (potentially) mass audiences. It’s possible that a lot of people are suddenly about to get a bit better at version-scrubbing, at understanding documents in time. And that means—maybe?—an audience for writing as real-time performance.

1. Start this Delrious time-lapse video of clouds in San Francisco, then immediately pause it to let it buffer and lower the volume to mute. (Nothing against His Boy Elroy, who provides the original score. I actually used that music in a movie of my own once.)

2. Press play on this song from Jason Kanakis and His Coalition of the Unwilling.

3. Start the Delrious video. Full-screen it, if you swing that way.

Two great tastes that taste great together. Delrious discovered via Towleroad and Kanakis via Aurgasm.

Among the coolest perspectives I’ve gotten to observe while working for the Knight Foundation this summer have been those of the program directors. These are the folks who make grants in the Foundation’s 26 geographic communities across the US, each of whom is analogous to the primary grant officer of a local foundation.

They have a different angle from most other community leaders. Unlike heads of nonprofits or companies, their main responsibilities aren’t executive. Unlike politicians, they’re not really responsible for allocating a budget to satisfy various constituencies. Unlike VCs, they don’t seek ROI in money or influence. Instead, their mission is to find the most promising vectors for investment in a community – the individuals or organizations whom, if given a boost, might really begin boosting others – and fund them. Only they don’t just fund their grantees, they also advise them, cultivate them, promote them, and help them form key relationships. Most of the program director’s work actually isn’t about giving money, it’s about ensuring the money they give has a maximum impact.

This week, Knight announced a grant in Wichita, Kansas, that to my mind reflects the best sort of realization of this mission. An outsized component of Wichita’s economy has been aviation manufacturing, which can leave the city subject to cyclical downturns. So Wichita State University created the Center of Innovation for Biomaterials in Orthopedic Research to take the facilities and know-how spent on making plane parts out of composite materials and develop that expertise into making medical devices, a market which continues to consume an ever-growing slice of US GDP. Knight’s gift of $2.1 million will help this transformation along.

That’s the background. The interesting story is what Anne Corriston, Knight’s program director in Wichita, did to accomplish this grant:

Mike Good, a key project planner and the director of business operations at Via Christi Research, said Wichita owes a debt to Corriston, who persuaded her board to give Wichita the grant.

Good said Corriston spent months studying hundreds of pages of documents on the project. She even took a five-week class [!!!] offered at WSU’s National Institute for Aviation Research, offered to non-science people studying composites.

“She wrote a better analysis of our business plan than did the people we hired to write an analysis of our business plan,” Good said.

I just think this is awesome. I feel like I end up in a lot of meetings where an ambitious vision to accomplish real social change turns into a plan to, um, start a Ning network. It’s way too rare that someone says, “I want to transform my city, so I’m going to take a five-week course on aviation composites!”

And then there’s this other fantastic part of the work of someone like Anne – this years-long discipline of putting pieces into place until things start to fall together. If you look at most of the grants Anne has arranged in Wichita, they seem earnest and straightforward – grants to tutor kids at the local Boys and Girls Club in reading and the sciences, grants to put in place a comprehensive elementary-through-college science and engineering curriculum – but not revolutionary. It’s only when you start to connect the dots – a few more kids in physics class, a few of whom might try out engineering in college, a couple of whom might end up working for CIBOR – that the patient, year-by-year process of transformation begins to show itself.

And if you find that little bit of pattern recognition sweet, you might share my love for this little narrative detail Anne posted after the grant was announced:

I actually learned about composites when I was a kid, but didn’t know what I was learning. My dad built a sailplane in our garage while I was growing up. He bought plans and over a number of years, with help from his flying buddies, many of whom were engineers at Cessna and Beech, built the fuselage and wings.

He used fiberglass and epoxy glue to create part of the wings so they’d be lightweight. When the epoxy dried, the fiberglass was much more durable with the hardened resin on it. That’s composites.

Dad is 75 now and building another plane. This time it’s a Tailwind in their basement. And yes, he’s still making stuff out of composites. I wasn’t aware of it until I started telling my parents about the grant I’d been working on while having Sunday dinner with them. That’s when Dad went down to his basement and brought up a little part he’d made from carbon fiber and resin.

Dad’s hobby plane in the garage plants the seeds of a $2 million grant. A butterfly flaps its wings.

I always wonder what my outmoded taboos and curmudgeon-triggers will be. As I grow older, what paranoias or prejudices will make young folks roll their eyes the way I tend to roll mine at Nicholas Carr and Maggie Gallagher?

I might just have come across one. I was reading the latest Washington Monthly story roiling the blogosphere – College for $99 a Month. The story notes the arrival of super-cheap online intro courses students can take for college credit (the title’s not a hypothetical), positing that this heralds the beginning of the newspaper crisis era for academia.

I caught myself going into full-on curmudgeon mode – No online learning program can match a good, old-fashioned stint at a real college! Then I reflected on the fact that my undergrad experience – four years living on campus at a private college far from home – was already pretty specialized. Even more specialized than, for example, sitting down each morning to read your (shudder) printed newspaper.

I can imagine all sorts of ways in which cheap college can be a wonderful thing. But my curmudgeon reflex keeps tugging me back to the unintended consequences, the questions of what we’ll lose. So this is what it feels like.

Jonathan Lethem on Thomas Edison and the legacies of early cinema:

[T]he truth of film’s origins as a series of devices enabling various public and private diversions persistently lurked in the goal of widening or multiplying its screen, or in the sport of enlisting other sensory apparatuses, with gimmicks like 3-D, Sensurround, and Smell-o- Vision. And this lurking truth explodes into relevance again in the era that began with the introduction of the VCR, and persists in a presently unfolding future that includes YouTube and handheld viewing devices, with episodic serials beamed into portable telephones already commonplace. As David Thomson points out in The Whole Equation, Edison’s Kinetoscope may just now be having its day.

Edison’s own last great contribution was, perversely, in driving the industry westward, out of the grasp of his copyrights and patents. Squatting toadlike on his rights, indeed, employing a private force of roving bully-enforcers, Edison more or less accidentally routed the fugitive innovators to California, beyond his reach. So the activities that began flourishing there, at that coastal brink of American self-invention, were branded as permanently expedient and on the run, piratically bold, and driven by a geographically renewable innocence, like the nation itself.

That’s from A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollers – “a cultural history of the United States in a self-consciously literary voice” (Scott Eric Kaufman), “neither reference nor criticism, neither history nor treatise, but a genre-defying, transcendent fusion of them all. It sounds impossible, but the result seems both inevitable and necessary and profoundly welcome, too” (Laura Miller).

Mark Sigal at O’Reilly looks at “four different use cases that capture the promise of an improved user experience around a reboot of the book” – in this case centered around the mythical Apple tablet (called here an “iPad”):

Travel Books: As noted in my post Touch Traveler: London, Paris and only an iPod Touch, travel is a very fertile space for a re-envisioned book, as it depends on good, timely information, just when you need it. For example, a travel book could always be up to date with real-time event calendars. Listings could be interconnected with maps, Wikipedia, live review sites, reservations/ticketing systems, video libraries, trip photos, messages and discussion threads, and fellow travelers’ notes of interest.

Children’s Books: Remember the Pop-Up book? It was the first interactive book, and it was pretty cool when I was a kid (before computers). What if you married the pluggable simplicity of Radio Shack’s 150-in-1 Electronic Project Kit to creating pop-up books? What kind of engaging stories could you create?

Comics & Graphic Novels: A format like the comic book or the graphic novel could push the envelope on good storytelling, especially if it was designed with the prosumer blogger in mind. I can readily imagine classics like Judge Dredd and Swamp Thing jumping off the screen on the iPad, not to mention the ability of storytellers to create multiple outcome forks based on different narrative paths chosen by the reader.

History & Science Books: Imagine learning what it’s like living through the current recessionary times with a book that is traversable based upon events, chronologies, or the road traveled by specific characters. A great sports book could allow you to relive a game-changing moment in a classic Series, or be game-ified to allow you to test your managerial instincts and see how different moves might have played out. What kind of pertri dish could an iPad enable, especially if it took advantage of the physical hardware accessory plugins the iPhone Platform can support?

Some overlap with what Snarkmarket’s said about the future of e-book readers, among, other places, here and here.

This post also included some thoughtful links to people writing about the new iTunes LP format, which does indeed show some potential for next-gen text. Jay Robinson talks about how it looks, then digs into the guts of the files to find WebKit, CSS, etc., while Tristan Lewis wonders about the possibility that the format could create something like an AppStore for content developers:

What if independent movie-makers or musicians could sell directly through the iTunes store and provide content on all the apple platforms (TV, iPod, phone, computer) with a single click. I suspect that many would be willing to give up 30 percent of their revenue in order to get to that public.

The components all seem to be there and it seems to me that it won’t be long before Apple starts pushing the idea that we are all content producers (an old idea at Apple, which was at the source of their creating the iLife suite) and we can all make some money at producing that content.

For my part, I’ve got no idea whether that’s what Apple is up to*, or even if this tablet, however coveted, will ever materialize.** But yeah, I think that could be nice.

* This is where Apple-as-a-toll-collector almost begins to make sense. Really, why do we need to wait? I mean, couldn’t ANYONE create a new format like this to deliver content? It’s HTML and CSS, folks – it’ll work in a web browser! But Apple’s got the store, the way to get it on dedicated devices, and the marketing clout to get people interested in it. So we wait.

** I also wonder whether Apple’s just waiting until we all get accustomed to reading things and watching video on teeny tiny screens, so that there won’t be a need to up the size of the iPod touch at all, rendering the whole thing moot. “Hmm, can’t find a good touchscreen vendor at that size… Maybe we can just wait for everyone’s brains and eyes to adapt.”Generations will die and be replaced by those who can easily read whole novels off pages the size of a deck of cards! We’re all going to have magnifying glasses implanted in our eye sockets, while our fingers become filed down to stylus points. And it will be magical.