The Back List in Print

The University of Minnesota Press has launched a new series of books -- based on its extensive back list, going all the way back to 1925. Minnesota Archive Editions (MAE) is a collaborative venture between UMP, Amazon.com, Minneapolis-based BookMobile, and Google Books. As some industry news stories point out, MAE allows consumers to access rare, out-of-print titles from the publisher's archives 1) at next to no cost to the publisher, and 2) through digitized distribution channels that maximize profit for the intermediaries.

This initiative is the latest example (in a long, long list of examples) of what Chris Anderson has called the "long tail" of technology-mediated, consumer-oriented economics. Anderson's basic thesis is that digital information technologies have streamlined and made hyper-efficient the old distribution networks of bringing commodities from the factory to points of consumption. Today, at minimal cost to the producer (who agrees to digitize his wares) and with the simple click of a button (on the consumer's end), we get books, movies, and music downloaded onto our computer or delivered to our door. The so-called long tail suggests that this relatively cheap method of distribution makes "low" demand for products still profitable for the producer because it doesn't cost him much to make his goods available to consumer niches.

Although MAE doesn't promise to be the next iTunes, it's sure to fascinate the academic world with its back list, and will likely turn a modest profit from scholars and intellectuals purchasing previously out-of-print titles. I myself am looking forward to the reprinting of Charles Wharton Stork's Arcadia Borealis: Selected Poems of Erik Axel Karlfeld (1938).

Fußball Ist Geil

The winter break is over, and that means European league soccer is returning to action this weekend. I thought I'd celebrate with a fantastic YouTube find.

This clip (~1970s) from a West German television program features the (at the time) latest soccer-themed high fashion. The elite soccer league in Germany is called the Bundesliga, and the clothing on display in this broadcast is inspired by the colors and designs of Germany's most famous clubs (Schalke, Hamburg, Dortmund, etc.). All I can say: Wow.

A Porn Bailout, or, What Would Richard Shelby Do?

Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama, has been bullish in opposing any form of government bailout for the auto industry. His logic is of the typical free-market, survival-of-the-fittest ideologue. But what would Sen. Shelby say to a proposed $5 billion porn bailout? Alabama is conservative, redder-than-red territory, no doubt, but surely many of his constituents can fess up to not wanting to see the American porn industry go down the tubes.

Larry Flynt, head of Larry Flynt Publications and its flagship publication Hustler, and Joe Francis, of Girls Gone Wild, have been working on a bailout proposal for U.S. porn. Gonzo news source TMZ already tracked down a few Congressmen and one Senator to get their take on the proposed plan, and the signs don't look promising. Still, Flynt is determined to relieve some of the burdens from the porn industry: "People are too depressed to be sexually active...This is very unhealthy as a nation...It's time for Congress to rejuvenate the sexual appetite of America."

Overseas the idea of a porn bailout has been met with more welcoming arms. The BBC brought a porn director on air to discuss the actual economics of the industry. Diversification in these tough economic (but bewilderingly hyper-technologized) times seemed to be his Plan B, in lieu of a government bailout of porn.

Following this take on Flynt and Francis's announcement, an Australian writer noted that there would be valuable economic lessons to learn from the U.S. government underwriting porn: "If the porn industry can be saved, the financial sector could be taught Porn Economics, the idea of sales of something people actually want, for the purpose of profit, as distinct from Subprime Economics, the sale of sexless garbage nobody ever needed for the purpose of destroying the global economy."

Back in the States, at least one independent businessman supports the proposed bailout. Glenn Wilson of Shreveport, Louisiana, says sales have been declining at his sex stores, Fun Shop Too. According to a local news source, Wilson would welcome a porn bailout in the hope of sparking sales.

In more promising news, one writer and sex activist notes that, even though the porn industry may be flagging at the moment, independent sex workers are likely to survive the recession without too much trouble. In surveying prostitutes' and escorts' success as advertisers, Carol Forsloff sees a canny ability to navigate tough economic times with drive and gusto -- and a theoretically inexhaustible set of "goods." Forsloff concludes, "So while the boys are asking for a bailout, the women carry on as business women with advertising and the like. The fact that they advertise widely, on their backs, on street corners, in phone directories and on the Internet, likely shows they are better prepared than Flynt and Francis."

I suppose if Richard Shelby and his colleagues reject Flynt and Francis's appeal for a porn bailout, they can always turn to the example of independent sex workers as people who are weathering the recession in the most innovative, business-savvy ways.

On Technocratic Style

Apparently Louis Menand of The New Yorker has already written a review-cum-farce about the issues of writing with Microsoft Word that I've taken up here and here. "The End Matter" deserves a complete reading, but here are some highlights:

On Word:

First of all, it is time to speak some truth to power in this country: Microsoft Word is a terrible program. Its terribleness is of a piece with the terribleness of Windows generally, a system so overloaded with icons, menus, buttons, and incomprehensible Help windows that performing almost any function means entering a treacherous wilderness of pop-ups posing alternatives of terrifying starkness: Accept/Decline/Cancel; Logoff/Shut Down/Restart; and the mysterious Do Not Show This Warning Again. You often feel that you’re not ready to make a decision so unalterable; but when you try to make the window go away your machine emits an angry beep. You double-click. You triple-click. Beep beep beep beep beep. You are being held for a fool by a chip.

On Clippy, Word's late Help icon, an eyeballed paper clip:

[I]f, God forbid, you ever begin a note or a bibliography entry with the letter “A.,” when you hit Enter, Word automatically types “B.” on the next line. Never, btw (which, unlike “poststructuralism,” is a word in Word spellcheck), ask that androgynous paper clip anything. S/he is just a stooge for management, leading you down more rabbit holes of options for things called Wizards, Macros, Templates, and Cascading Style Sheets.

On the Chicago Manual of Style's somewhat curious advice about punctuation:

Some of the advice is frankly a matter of taste. “An exclamation point added in brackets to quoted material to indicate editorial protest or amusement is strongly discouraged, since it appears contemptuous,” the authors counsel. “The Latin expression sic (thus) is preferred.” First of all, the reason the bracketed exclamation point appears contemptuous is that you use it when you wish to express contempt. There is nothing wrong with contempt. Second (which Chicago insists on, although generations of pedants have believed “secondly” to be the proper usage), sic is a far more damning interpolation, combining ordinary, garden-variety contempt with pedantic condescension. Elsewhere in Punctuation, the instructions are sometimes the reverse of enlightened. What could the authors possibly have been thinking when they committed the following sentence to print: “The semicolon, stronger than a comma but weaker than a period, can assume either role [!]” ?

Does AutoCorrect Correct AutoCorrect?

The answer to the question posed in my title is, Yes, it does. Which is to say, the word "AutoCorrect" is included in Microsoft Word's database of words that are deemed legitimate words in the English language, and therefore not in need of squiggly-red-line correction as you type it in a document. Try it for yourself: compare AutoCorrect with LoobyBooby or HarlemGlobetrotters. AutoCorrect is given the green light, while the other two are stopped in their tracks with the iconic red line. HarperCollins -- the publisher -- is, like AutoCorrect, deemed to be legitimate.

I've written elsewhere on this blog about Jacques Derrida's efforts to figure out AutoCorrect on his word-processing program (whether Derrida was using Word or not is debatable -- but it's highly likely that he was). More recently, Chris Wilson has written an article about Word's sluggish updating of its word database. Because Microsoft employs human-supervised editorship of the database, the process of including new words in it is slow and uneven. Wilson suggests that Word adopt a Google way of analyzing the correct spelling of words algorithmically, based largely on the recognition of frequently used words (and their [mostly] correct spellings) online.

We aren't there yet, of course. Which leaves open the possibility to experiment with words (mostly proper nouns) that you think may or may not appear in the Word word database. If you come across a "legitimate" word (using your own defintion of "legitimate" -- it can come from academese or it may be something more befitting of the Urban Dictionary) that has yet to be registered in the database, accept it into your own Word program for Microsoft to consider whenever it uploads user information.

Here are a few approved (+) and unapproved (-), or yet-to-be approved, word combinations that I came up with:

Jacques Derrida (+) vs. Alain Badiou (-)
Frantz Fanon (+) vs. Gayatri Spivak (-) (most South Asian names were rejected)
Blackburn Rovers (+) vs. Wigan Athletic (-)
Radiohead (+) vs. Wilco (-)
Ryan Vu (+) vs. Gerry Canavan (-)
Motherfucker (+) vs. Mofo (-)

Still Reading Milton after All These Years

I continue to be impressed by Stanley Fish's commitment to Milton studies, even as his academic star-power takes him to the heights of institutional authority and public intellectualism (via his very popular New York Times blog "Think Again"). His reflections on a quatercentenary Milton conference over the summer manage to make a highly specialized academic field accessible to lay readers interested in understanding what all the fuss is about (and why they should care). The piece is also a fine condensation of the central argument of Fish's definitive tome on over forty years of Milton scholarship, How Milton Works (2001).

More recently, Fish wrote on a new prose translation of Milton's Paradise Lost, by the Canadian Miltonist Dennis Danielson. Through line-by-line comparisons of Milton's poetry and Danielson's prose, Fish suggests that the inquiring, interpretively rich poetic voice of Milton is replaced by Danielson's (necessarily) reductive, interpretively blunt prose voice. Without dismissing Danielson's efforts as a fellow Miltonist, Fish makes clear that this new Paradise Lost is best read as an interpretation of the epic poem rather than as a substitute for it. And indeed much can be gleaned from Danielson's work, from a pedagogical point of view:

The edition is a parallel one — Milton’s original on the left hand page and Danielson’s prose rendering on the right. This means that you can ask students to take a passage and compare the effects and meanings produced by the two texts. You can ask students to compose their own translations and explain or defend the choices they made. You can ask students to look at prose translations in another language and think about the difference, if there is one, between translating into a foreign tongue and translating into a more user-friendly version of English. You can ask students to speculate on the nature of translation and on the relationship between translation and the perennial debate about whether there are linguistic universals.

In other words, teachers can subject Danielson's interpretation to a classroom interpretive inquiry of their own -- in which case it should be made clear that students are reading Danielson reading Milton. Perhaps such an effort would be best suited for a graduate seminar, or a practicum on Milton's language and various editions of Paradise Lost.

Like his literary hero, though, Fish is a brilliant wordsmith, and there's a hint in the piece that Fish would prefer to go to the source itself (Milton's poetry) for interpretive exercise. Note that the piece is titled "'Paradise Lost' in Translation," which is at once a literal rendering of what Danielson has done here -- translating the poem into prose -- as well as a figurative play on the word "lost": "paradise" (the interpretive "paradise" of the infinite potential of asking questions through Milton's poetry) being "lost" through Danielson's translation.

The Joy of Sex Redux

Ariel Levy (of Female Chauvinist Pigs fame/infamy) has written a droll review of the new edition of the bestselling how-to manual, The Joy of Sex. Originally published in 1972 by a British physician, The Joy of Sex was the Baby Boomers' middlebrow foray into the sexual revolution -- a handy, "mature" guide to making love with just the right amount of risk and set against the backdrop of normalcy.

Levy's review offers a helpful biography of the book's quirky author, Dr. Alex Comfort (ahem), whose Polaroid-captured lovemaking sessions with his mistress served as the basis for the illustrations in the book's first edition. The online version of the article also features a slide show of some of these illustrations, as well as their more progressive counterparts in the pro-woman Our Bodies, Ourselves (1971) and the new edition of The Joy of Sex.

I've done my own research and found websites devoted to the illustrator for the original book, Chris Foss. It turns out Foss, although best known for his work on The Joy of Sex, is also a well-regarded illustrator of science fiction book covers.



You can find examples of his colorful work here and here. Foss has even done a bunch of covers for French sci-fi books. All of which is to say there's something to be written about illustrators' role in the burgeoning paperback print culture of the 1960s and '70s. After all, like Foss's beautiful covers for Asimov and Le Guin, isn't part of the joy of reading The Joy of Sex taking in the how-to pictures?





Finally, the gem of the bunch: Foss's cover for the British edition of J. G. Ballard's High-Rise (1975). Here we seem to have the best of both worlds: sex and futuristic death.