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The Author's Guild Does Not Speak For Me

I'm a card-carrying member of the Author's Guild, but I won't be for long if they continue with colossally short-sighted stunts like their recent suit against the Google Library Project. I could say more about it, but Tim O'Reilly said exactly what I've been thinking -- and more -- in his superb op-ed in today's Times. Here's the key point:

A search engine for books will be revolutionary in its benefits. Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors than copyright infringement, or even outright piracy. While publishers invest in each of their books, they depend on bestsellers to keep afloat. They typically throw their products into the market to see what sticks and cease supporting what doesn't, so an author has had just one chance to reach readers. Until now.

Google promises an alternative to the obscurity imposed on most books. It makes that great corpus of less-than-bestsellers accessible to all. By pointing to a huge body of print works online, Google will offer a way to promote books that publishers have thrown away, creating an opportunity for readers to track them down and buy them.

I've always taken what I consider to be a middle ground on IP issues: I don't have de facto objections to a little digital rights management (I think, for instance, that the iTunes DRM is a reasonable compromise), and while I'm a huge admirer of Larry Lessig, I've also written a few things that have been critical of his positions over the years. I think, obnoxious as they are, that the music industry execs are not entirely wrong to call file sharing stealing. But what Google Library is doing is in no way a violation of my rights as an author. As Tim says, they're actually doing us all a service. We should be thanking them for Google Library, not taking them to court.

Gladwell/Johnson

Just a quick note to say that Malcolm Gladwell and I are doing some kind of joint appearance at The Strand bookstore in NYC this Wednesday, the 21st of September, at 6:30. (The Strand is at 12th and Broadway.) Right now the blurb on their site says that we'll both be reading from our books, but I suspect we'll end up doing something more interesting than that. I have no idea right now what that will be, but I'm sure we'll figure something out.

Finding Lost

In my list of weird coincidences, this has got to rank pretty high: earlier this year, I'm flying to London to do the publicity tour over there for Everything Bad. I'm sitting next to a British guy, and and an hour or so into the flight, we start chatting. He asks if I'm flying over for business or pleasure, and I say business, and he asks what I do, and I say I'm promoting a new book.

Him: Oh really? What's the book?

Me: It's this funny little thing called Everything Bad Is Good For You.

Him: [smiling] Ah yes, I've read it.

Me: No way! It hasn't even come out in Britain yet!

Him: Actually, the paper where I work bought the first serial rights.

Me: How amazing. So you worked at the London Times? What do you do there?

Him: [somewhat sheepishly] I'm, um, the editor-in-chief.

Crazy, huh? I said later that not only was he the first person I'd randomly sat next to on a plane who'd actually read one of my books -- he was also the first person I'd randomly sat next to who had bought the first serial rights to one of my books.

I say all this because during the flight I was also watching episodes of the ABC show Lost on my laptop, and I brought it to my seatmate's attention because there are often shots of the original plane crash interspersed through the episodes, and I didn't want him looking over and thinking I was some kind of a freak who liked to watch footage of plane crashes while actually flying in a plane. So we got started talking about Lost, which had not made it over to the UK at that time. And then three months later, I get an email from an editor at the Times saying that the show is now airing over there, and that his boss recalls me saying something interesting about the show and did I want to write a piece about it.

I thought it sounded like a great idea, because in many ways Lost embodied a lot of the themes I was exploring in the book, but I didn't get around to seeing it until the manuscript was done. (As is so often the case, I was prodded into watching it by my longtime pop culture confidant, Alex Ross, who was a huge help when I was writing the book.) So I wrote a nice little column for the Times, which for the life of me I cannot find on their website. But about half of it will be familiar to most of you who have followed the Everything Bad discussion. Given that ABC is about to start airing season two of Lost next week, I thought I'd quote a little from the Lost-specific parts of the piece:

By genre, Lost is a disaster narrative -- closest in spirit to the airplane disaster movies over the seventies, which were as a genre so awful that they spawned an entire sub-genre of parodies. But Lost's creator J. J. Abrams -- who co-wrote and directed the show's breaktaking two-hour opening episode -- announced in the very first seconds of the show that this was no Airport 77 remake. If the networks had made Lost thirty years ago, it would have followed a fixed narrative flight path: introduce all the passengers and the pilots and the feuding stewardesses; learn each of their “backstories;” and then have the engines fail. Abrams did away with that entire prologue: Lost begins seconds after the crash, and so from the very beginning of the show, the twenty-odd survivors that we focus on are complete mysteries to the audience. We know nothing about them, and so the narrative pleasure comes from watching these interlinked histories being slowly revealed over the course of the season, in flashbacks and reminiscences.

Thirty years ago, of course, no American show would have dared to put twenty recurring characters into a network drama. (Even the socially complex prime-time soaps like Dallas tended to max out at around ten primary characters, while the sitcom's sweet spot seemed to be at around six: just enough for a nuclear family and the wacky neighbor next door.) But no show back then would have dreamt of submitting the audience to so much deliberately murky narrative information. Only the notoriously opaque Twin Peaks -- a minor network hit in the early nineties -- compares to Lost's entanglements. And indeed, Lost came very close to disappearing off the map itself: executives at ABC and its parent company Walt Disney had so little faith in the project that they fired the network chairman who had originally proposed the idea of a plane crash epic to Abrams. Only the lavish budget already spent on the pilot -- $12M, several times larger than television norm -- persuaded the network to give the show a chance.

Mystery, of course, is a staple of much serial drama. (Dickens, after all, compulsively ended his installments with a tantalizing cliffhanger.) But when American television has withheld information for the purposes of suspense, it has historically focused on a single unanswered question, “who shot JR?” being the canonical example. As uncanny as it was, Twin Peaks itself would have never attracted a mainstream audience without a central, catchphrase mystery at its core: who killed Laura Palmer?

The genius of Lost is that its mysteries are fractal: at every scale -- from the macro to the micro -- the series delivers a consistent payload of confusion. There are the biographical riddles: why was the beautiful Kate accompanied by a federal marshal on the flight? There are geographic riddles (“why have the rescue teams missed the island, and why does it appear to have a history of attracting castaways?”) and historical ones (“why has that SOS signal been playing for so many years?”) And then there are existential riddles: are these people even alive at all? Perhaps there were no survivors, and these characters are just ghosts haunting an island of lost souls. Or does Abrams have up his sleeve an elaborate homage to The Island Of Dr. Moreau?

These are only a handful of the unanswered questions that arise in the first six episodes. I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation and came up with roughly thirty genuinely mysterious plot elements that season one offers up. I won't give anything away, but each of the main characters turns out to be, well, more complicated than they initially appeared, and the island itself turns out to be the most complicated of all. Narratives by definition work by withholding information about future events; you tune in to find out what will happen next. But with Lost, the mystery lies in the present tense: half the time, you have no idea what's happening right now.

Bush's Perfect Storm

[I've had some technical difficulties with the blog the past week, so this is the first chance I've had to post anything. These are some thoughts I jotted down over the weekend, watching the Katrina disaster unfold.]

Imagine if a few weeks ago someone had polled all of the Bush critics in the country, and asked them to list the primary faults that they see in this administration. I suspect, give or take a few entries, the results would have looked something like this:

Obsession with Iraq at the cost of all other national priorities
Unwillingness to admit mistakes
Hostility to science
Embarrassing juvenile attitude
Indifference to the fates of the poorest members of society
Cronyism and unwillingness to fire anyone for incompetence
Tendency to spend way too much time on vacation
Inability to plan and execute large-scale operations effectively

If Hurricane Katrina ends up being the turning point when it becomes clear to a solid majority of the country that Bush has been a fundamentally incompetent leader, I suspect it will be because the Katrina crisis turned out expose all eight of these flaws. The hurricane itself may have swerved east and dropped down to a category 3 before it hit land, but where Bush's political reputation was concerned, it was the perfect storm.

Just a few quotes to illustrate my point:

Obsession with Iraq at the cost of all other national priorities

"...the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers requested $27 million for this fiscal year to pay for hurricane-protection projects around Lake Pontchartrain. The Bush administration countered with $3.9 million, and Congress eventually provided $5.7 million, according to figures provided by the office of U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.)." -- the Chicago Tribune

Unwillingness to admit mistakes

"I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." -- President Bush, on Good Morning America

Hostility to science

"A major hurricane could swamp New Orleans under 20 feet of water, killing thousands. Human activities along the Mississippi River have dramatically increased the risk, and now only massive reengineering of southeastern Louisiana can save the city." -- Scientific American, 2001

Embarrassing juvenile attitude

"'The good news is - and it's hard for some to see it now - that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house - there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch.' (Laughter)." - George W. Bush

Indifference to the fates of the poorest members of society

Andrew Sullivan on the Lott quote: "Just think of that quote for a minute; and the laughter that followed. The poor and the black are dying, dead, drowned and desperate in New Orleans and elsewhere. But the president manages to talk about the future 'fantastic' porch of a rich, powerful white man who only recently resigned his position because he regretted the failure of Strom Thurmond to hold back the tide of racial desegregation."

Cronyism and unwillingness to fire anyone for incompetence

From Josh Marshall: "So, just to recap, Brown had no experience whatsoever in emergency management. He was fired from his last job for incompetence. He was hired because he was the new director's college roommate. And after the director -- who himself got the job because he was a political fixer for the president -- left, he became top dog. And President Bush said yesterday that he thinks Brown is "doing a helluva job'."

Tendency to spend way too much time on vacation

Bush is being criticized for not ending his vacation the second it became clear that the "near-miss" of first reports wasn't in fact, a near-miss at all. But just think about this for a second: we're talking about a scenario (Category 4-5 storm hits New Orleans) that experts have long predicted would result in a massive disaster that could easily produce ten times 9/11's loss of life. And by Saturday, all the forecasters were saying that this was the most likely path the storm was going to take. But somehow that wasn't enough to get Bush off the ranch. (Not to mention the rest of this slacker administration.)

Inability to plan and execute large-scale operations effectively

See all the above.