Critical Mass

There has recently been a firestorm–as there so often is in these Internet-fed, cable television-stoked days–concerning the comments that a young woman, a self published novelist, made on a book review blog that gave her tome a mildly unflattering review.  The attendant hoo-hah is not my concern.  Others have covered that territory as thoroughly and even-handedly as can be done.  My concern is something other:  Should writers or any artists read reviews?

I doubt it.  Despite the well-worn notion that criticism should be taken with a tugged forelock and a mumbled “Thank’ee, Mrs,” I think it is a mistake for artists to read criticism of their own works.  (Even when the criticisms, as in the cited case, involve proofreading errors and rhetorical disasters.)  There are a couple of assumptions I hold, fundamentally, that lead me to this conclusion.  First, I think that a review of anything is essentially a conversation between consumers (sorry about calling readers and movie watchers and everyone else who takes in some work of art a “consumer,” but it was convenient shorthand) of that particular art.  It is the reader’s hope to find out whether a given work is worth the time they would need to commit to it, and it is the reviewer’s job to give them the best hints they can on whether it is or not.  The artist is not part of that conversation; the artist is no more than an artifact in such a discussion.

Second, I think that such criticism–from a reviewer and not from an editor, a colleague, a director, a loved one–is irrelevant to the work of the artist.  For one thing, reviewers can only review the work that is the most recent, not the next in line.  Therefore, from the artist’s point-of-view, reviewers are talking about something that is dead and in the past.  There comes a point in every project in which the artist must let go of it and move on.  Otherwise, all any artist would ever do is worry over a work endlessly and compulsively, for every work is flawed, especially in the eyes of the poor sap who created it.  And you can’t go back, only forward.  All of an artist’s focus has to be on the next project, the next work, the next thing to which that person must commit his or her imagination, attention, and energy.  As with Lot’s wife, looking back is disastrous and paralyzing.

And what can be gained by an artist from reading a review anyway?  Let’s say that there are two reviews and they conflict, as is generally the case.  Which review is the correct one?  Should the artist make the corrections demanded by one critic and remove them at the behest of the other?  Is one more correct than the other, and, if so, how is such a judgment to be made?  No.  As I see it, there are only two things that can happen when artists read their reviews, and both of them are bad.  On the one hand, if the review is negative at all, the artist’s feelings will get hurt and confidence undermined, and there’s a pretty good chance that you’ll end up with the sort of brouhaha that I linked to above.

The second possibility is even worse.  The reviews could be good and the artist can start to believe them.

Creating a decent work of art is difficult enough without one’s head being filled with notions.  From what I know from my meager experience and what I can glean from the comments of my betters, creating a work of art–even a mediocre or bad one–is an arduous task, won with sweat and molded with craft.  And once one is convinced that one is a genius, a magician who creates timeless masterpieces with a mere wave of the hand, how is one supposed motivate oneself to do the dirty work that is needed?

I know that in this age of workshops and focus groups, critique groups and MFA programs that the idea that the artist should walk alone without correction, suggestion, and “support” is a kind of blasphemy, but there you are.  That’s how I feel.  It is a lonely trail the artist wanders, filled with brambles and sinkholes.  I think of something that Joseph Campbell talked about, an image presented in the Arthurian legends.  In one version of the tales, the Knights of the Round Table approach a thicket and agree to each hack his way through the tangle on his own path.  And each one who crosses another’s path and starts to go down it follows it to his own peril.  It is a hard and lonely and perilous journey that the artist embarks on, but the glory of it is that, whatever that journey may turn out to be, it is that person’s own.

Gamy Art

Recently, Roger Ebert, who has lately been trying to flesh out his film critic’s resume with social criticism and political commentary, found himself at the center of a firestorm when he wrote a blog post in which he dared to opine that video games are not Art.  Things got to the point (something short of picketers patrolling the sidewalk outside his townhouse, I’m sure) that he posted something of a limited retraction yesterday.  Now, I’m not sure whether any video games are or can be Art, but such a controversy cannot help but produce a variety of thoughts in the typical blogging blowhard, such as your truly.  So, here goes.

Now, one of the gimmicks that Mr Ebert used in trying to bolster his argument was to use his Twitter account to get people to participate in an online survey:  Which of these would you value more, a great video game or Huckleberry Finn.  Now the problems with the survey, as Ebert himself has noted, are legion.  First, he is pitting something generic and theoretical (“a great video game”) against something specific and capable of being assessed as the thing it is.  Second, his sample was unscientific and not likely to be representative of the population at large.  Third, what does it mean to “value” something?  And does valuing something “more” mean not valuing the other thing at all?  People who know the mechanics of surveying and sampling could take this apart in a dozen ways, I’m sure.  In fact, it would be interesting to see what Nate Silver would make of it.

In terms of results, the first wave went decidedly Huck Finn’s way, but a decisive wave in the last 5000 of 12,000 votes made the seesaw tilt in just the opposite direction.  But what information can we truly extrapolate from this?  That a “great video game” is artistically superior to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?  Not really.  What it says to me is that gamers, who, in order to properly pursue their hobby, must cultivate a desire to win, simply flooded the survey site once word got around that they were losing.  Which brings me to the first difficulty that video games designers would encounter in trying to make a work of art.  A game, by definition, is a thing that the participants try to win.  Winning and losing are alien concepts to the appreciation of art.

Whatever art is or isn’t, it certainly doesn’t involve accumulating points or reaching ever-higher levels of play.  Art is, I think, a sorting through of the experience of life, a comparison of notes concerning what this trip is that we are all separately and together embarked on.  The questions posed and examined by art are myriad and are not capable of easy summation.  But art does not involve the attainment of a goal.  It, like life, just is.  Now, in theory, I can imagine that there could be a game that just is, but it would be a pretty Zen game.  And would most people who play these games be interested in a Zen game?  Would it be up there with Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft?  I find that to be unlikely.

Marshall McLuhan talked about bits of technology being extensions of earlier or other things.  A hammer is the extension of a fist.  An automobile is an extension of legs and feet and walking.  A blog is, ultimately, an extension of speech.  What then is a video game an extension of?  Most directly, typically, it is an extension of games played in literal arcades that were and are part of midways and fairs and carnivals.  And all games are, ultimately, extensions of the natural play of children.  Art, however, is rooted in the impulse to religion.  Play is a way of practicing skills.  Art is a way of pondering that which is difficult to ponder.

One thing I can’t understand is why gamers want their games to be considered Art (the capital A signifying the significant significance of it).  Of course, we do live in a culture that tends to equate Art with all that is good and uplifting and noble.  But it’s not.  There is a huge amount of shit art in the world, far more than there is good stuff.  And a lot of the shit becomes famous and admired and gets fawned over by experts who can only justify their expertise by raving about useless crap and thereby proving the perspicacity of their taste.  Were gamers to understand art as being something that can be good or bad, would they be so insistent on video games being defined as Art?  Probably not.  And, frankly, it is better for a game to be a good game than it is to be crappy art.

Several of Roger Ebert’s respondents in this controversy stated that they experienced every emotion imaginable while playing various games.  Fair enough, but is that really true?  There is a painting by Renoir that I once had the privilege of seeing in person at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts called Dance at Bougival.

The man leans his face hungrily toward the woman’s, and she looks away in a manner that suggests, to me, both regret and resignation.  It is an extraordinary thing to see, very powerful, very moving.  Is it possible, while playing a video game, to come across and experience, through compassion, this sort of complex emotion?  Do gamers truly feel wistfulness, nostalgia, bemusement, and schadenfreude?  Do video games persuade the player to have compassion–that is, to participate actively in the sufferings of another–for the characters portrayed in them?  Aren’t most of the characters involved merely objects meant to be either overcome or destroyed?    Aren’t most of the major characters separated into the sentimentalized binary categories of Good or Evil?  Is there truly roundness or complexity to the characters?  And aren’t the dominant emotions involved a sense of accomplishment when things are going well and frustration when they are not?

I’ve mostly played sporting video games myself, although I have tried other kinds a few times over the years.  Not really my cup of tea.  Most of my experience with them comes from observation.  I’ve watched my son, in recent years, play a variety of games without ever once observing him have a moment sublime or caring.  Years ago, I had a coworker who liked to play a rather vicious game called Wolfenstein when he was supposed to be working.  He had me stand behind his shoulder to watch once, and I couldn’t have been more mortified.  He, however, did not pick up on that because he was too fixated on murdering as many nameless, faceless, human-shaped objects as he could before they finally got him.  I don’t know what effect games like that had on Harris and Klebold when they decided to shoot up Columbine High School, but they certainly did nothing to encourage the compassionate sort of worldview that might have kept them from committing the attack.  Would it have mattered had they been as immersed in various art forms as they were in the video game culture?  It’s impossible to say, of course, but I don’t remember anyone going berserk because of their obsession with the music of Bach or Citizen Kane or the paintings of Camille Pissarro.

Video games certainly make use of artistic techniques, and there are, apparently, on some games images of great beauty.  And what is the Venus de Milo about if not only its own extraordinary beauty?  And yet, the images, the music, the dialogue in the introductory scenes of video games do not constitute the whole thing.  They are ancillary to the purpose of the game itself, a kind of video game filigree.  Games exist to be played, not to be appreciated as artistic inventions.

One final point.  In his book Das Glasperlenspiel (also known as Magister Ludi), Hermann Hesse used what he called The Glass Bead Game as a symbol for all that was knowable by humans throughout the history of art, science, and philosophy.  There is no way when he was writing the book in the 1930s that he could have imagined such a thing as the modern video game.  But is it not possible that the video game could evolve into just such a thing?  I’m not sure.  I don’t think that it is entirely out of the question.  However, I suspect that the game that would truly and unarguably accomplish that would no longer be a game.  I think that the experience of the player as a participant obviates his or her ability to experience the thing as a piece of art.  Perhaps not.  Perhaps it is possible for video games to veer away from melodrama and manufactured emotions.  But would a person have the same experience of Oedipus or Hamlet or Willy Loman if he had to enact them in a game atmosphere?  Doesn’t the power of art come from it being observed rather than enacted?  I used to be an actor, and I never had the kind of experience onstage that I could get from the audience.  It wasn’t my job to.

I think, at the end of the day, that gamers should simply enjoy the games for what they are.  They are certainly entertainments, and valid as entertainments.  I don’t think that they need to be justified as Art any more than baseball does or mumblety peg or Monopoly or Hungry Hungry Hippos.  Gamers should just play them for what they are and enjoy them, and not engage in a pretentious exercise, based in a sense of inferiority, of trying to get them classified as “Art.”

Online Bookselling v. Real Life and Independent v. Big Box

In my last post, which occurred exactly one month ago, I threatened to pollute the blogosphere, Interwebs, and other such figments of the collective imagination with more thoughts about bookselling.  We’ll see how I do.  With any luck, I’ll make a modicum of sense.

First, taking a cue from a thoughtful comment made last time, I will discuss online v. retail store sales.  Barnes & Noble, in its 2nd quarter 2009 results (which would be from last summer, since their fiscal year extends into 2010), reports that store sales were down from the previous year by 2% to $950 million.  Online sales, on the other hand, were up by 9% and had accounted for revenues of $120 million.  Clearly, online sales are gaining on retail sales overall.  However, it should be noted that retail sales still account for almost eight times the income that online sales do, and that the stores brought in almost $1 billion in a period of three months.  Not quite a death rattle yet.

The fallacy that I find in discussions of online v. retail and electronic reader v. paper book is the assumption that it is a zero-sum game, that the two versions of reality can’t exist together.  I find that to be nonsense, pure and simple.  The question in each case is not which one will prevail and which disappear, it is a question of what percentage of sales will be accounted for by one and how much by the other.  In the case of online v. retail, the ratio seems to still be determining itself.  Will online sales account for more than 11% of B&N’s total sales in the future?  Quite possibly.  I haven’t seen any reason to think that online sales as a percentage of total sales has leveled off yet.  We’ll see as more quarters and fiscal years go by.

(Just for the record, sales of electronic books seems to have plateaued at 5% of total book sales.  This past October, e-books accounted for 2.5% of all books sold, which is still a ways from 100%.)

My prediction:  in the future there will be online sales of books and retail sales of books.  We will not see a world without bookstores any more than we will see a world without online retailers.  Each type of sales will find its level, and, frankly, I would be surprised if online sales ever overtake traditional retail sales in volume.  E-books, which have yet to outstrip audio books in sales, will remain mostly a curiosity.

Now, the second part of my thesis is less a prediction or a sighting of a trend than it is the report of a perceived opportunity.  It’s like a running back seeing a hole; it’s one thing to see the hole, and it’s another to do something about it.

That being said, I think that online inroads in bookselling might be an opportunity for independent bookstores.  I think that in order to do so, they will have to limit the categories they carry.  It will be better for them to have depth in one category than be thin in a hundred.  They will also need to make certain that their staff is extremely knowledgeable.  Put requested volumes in customers’ hands.  Provide superior customer service.  Provide a good atmosphere for browsing and reading.  I might be wrong about all of this, but it’s worth a shot.

Newspaper Madness

One of the arguments that people–and by people I mean print journalists–make for the inability of newspapers to move online is the claim that the level of reporting would suffer because news outlets, due to the smaller levels of revenue available online, would have to close foreign bureaus and layoff staff and just generally not be able to do as much reporting as they have traditionally done.  Fair enough.  The loss of solid reporting would be a loss to society.  However, that argument can only hold water if the two basic assumptions underpinning it–that quality reporting can’t be accomplished without a wide network of standing bureaus and that online reporting is inherently inferior to its print cousin–are actually true.  I’ve encountered a couple of things in recent weeks that lead me to believe that neither is.

The first has been the coverage of the demonstrations in Iran.  While The New York Times has mostly reported on the press releases and statements of the most hardline Ayatollahs and the dismal to the point of being pathetic Ahmadinejad, Andrew Sullivan on his blog The Daily Dish has been doing actual reporting based on Twitter tweets and emails and on information gleaned from people who have connections with family and friends inside Iran.  This is reporting.  And this is why, when a very important and respected group of Ayatollahs came out against the recent election, all the big news outlets were slack-jawed in their disbelief while Andrew and his readers were not.

The second piece of reporting has had to do with the sudden resignation last week by Governor Sarah Palin.  (For the sake of the argument I am presenting, I offer no opinions for or against Gov. Palin.  This has to do with reporting facts, not opinions.)  While the MSM took the Governor’s statement at face value and, even in interviews, tossed her softball questions, online outlets were checking her statements to see what was factual and what wasn’t.  Again, the online outlets are reporting while the MSM is passing along press releases.

None of this is new.  The MSM let us down in considering the Iraq War.  They let us down on torture allegations.  They’ve let us down over-and-over again for the longest time.  It predates Mr. Bush’s presidency and it has outlived it.  The big newspapers and the networks and the other big news outlets have routinely relied on press conferences and government contacts instead of real reporting, which is simply awful and lazy journalism.  All the actual journalism that gets done gets shunted into a special category called “investigative journalism” and is done mostly by magazines rather than newspapers and news shows.  All the MSM really does is support the status quo, which is what state-supported media are supposed to do.  If they are not asking questions about everybody in power all the time (and this is where Fox News also misses the mark:  they coddle one side and attack the other) they are not doing their jobs.  They have stopped being reporters and started being merely typists and apologists.

I think that the MSM can either adapt or die.  I think that journalism suffers from being made into a profession instead of a calling.  I think reporters should dig and question and be cynical about politicians and aloof from them.  I think that finding ways of supporting them in their current condition is bad for democracy and bad for the Republic.

I Get the Picture

Despite checking it relentlessly throughout the day, I don’t always get a lot of value out of Facebook.  I look at my homepage, shrug, and move on.  There’s something about both it and Twitter that I have trouble with.  As egocentric as I am, I still can’t be persuaded that anybody needs to know the excruciating minutiae of my daily life.  Does it really matter what I’m doing at any given moment, as long as it’s reasonably legal and only involves consenting adults?

However, I have just had an interesting experience on Facebook.  The niece of one of my “friends” (he and I were true friends during high school, but are, in reality, something less than  acquaintances now) posted a series of pictures taken at some family event.  Now, of course, there’s a very human tendency to remember people as they were rather than as how they are.  This was brought into sharp focus for me when I came across, among these photos, a shot of my friend’s parents.  I remember them as they were 30 or more years ago, probably about the age I am now.  And here I saw them, aged appropriately, still easily recognizable for who they were, who they had been.  And yet it was still a shock.

The smiles were still the same, hers open and friendly, his more wry and knowing.  He looks at her with love, as he always did, and I am transported.  I am young and callow, thin as a straw and riddled with acne and insecurity.  We are in their kitchen in the sturdy yellow house on a quiet small street.  My friend’s mother is cooking or cleaning or waiting on someone.  His father sits at the table at the wall by the door, reading the paper which is spread flat before him.  He sips a beer in tall, slender beer glass at patient intervals, spicing it with a taste of salt taken from a supply he keeps in the crook at the base of his thumb.

This is a happy memory for me.  More than that, it is a memory content.  This is a home for me, a second home, not in opposition to my real home as is so often the case, but an extension of it.  Another haven of acceptance and accord.

To see these people again, the mother, the father, the brother, the sisters, to see the person who was once the friend of the person who was once me is a pleasure, a welcome wave of sentiment and remembrance.  Many years have passed and all of these lives, mine and theirs, have gone in ways discrete and different.  I am, such as I am now, mostly unknown to them and they to me.  And yet in  my memory, so many years ago, I feel their presence and their being.  And amongst the strains and trials of life, amongst the difficult people and the slights and troubles that refuse to be forgotten, I still have that haven.

The Book Industry

Over the last few days, most recently on The New Yorker website, I have read several blog posts heralding the end of the publishing industry, the death of the humble book, and the triumph of the electronic reader.  I find all of this to be hooey and all the wheezing and ranting going on to be nothing other than Henny-Pennyish panicking.

This is not to say that the publishing industry isn’t changing and morphing into a new entity that will include fully digitized books as part of their wares.  Of course it is changing, and I think there’s a chance that it might even improve.  Of course, the first canard in the “Death of Publishing” bag is the idea that these folks are talking, truly, about publishing as an industry.  These doomsayers all seem to be New York publishing professionals who confuse the occupants of certain office buildings in Manhattan as being “the publishing industry,” and, in fact, to be literature itself.  This is, of course, nonsense and is nothing more than egotism evolving into paranoia.  Random House and Bertelsmann can go the way of the do-do and publishing will continue very nicely thank you.  It just won’t be happening as much in the usual midtown Manhattan locations.

But before I go further with that thought, let me address a couple of the arguments that get made concerning “the death of publishing.”  (If I had any business sense, I’d come up with a way to trademark “the death of publishing.”  There’s a fortune to be made from this over the next several years.  Maybe I can form a corporation to be the owner and publisher of this blog.  I can then make the slogan for the company “The Death of Publishing Since 2008.”  I would go see my lawyer about this, only I don’t have one.)  The main argument that gets made is that electronic readers, such as the Kindle or the Sony Reader, will soon displace the forlorn hardcover and paperback book, just as the iPod has eliminated the CD, which it hasn’t.  In fact, every post I come across addressing this subject makes an analogy between the Kindle and the iPod, which would be fine if they were analogous.  But they’re not.

Let’s think about this.  What are the technological advantages of the iPod over portable CD players, which is what the iPod really replaced?  It eliminates skipping and other playback problems that occured with portable CD players.  This has never been a problem with books, and it isn’t improved by any electronic reader.  You can put your CD collection on the iPod and sample from your entire collection in a moment.  Although on its face this might seem to have an analogue in the Kindle, it really doesn’t.  You see, the dozens and dozens of books I already own, unlike the dozens and dozens of CDs I own, are not downloadable.  In order to get that content on a Kindle or other device, I would have to purchase each one anew.  The brilliance of the iPod is that it sprang from a fully digitized world.  It did not have to create one from scratch.

The other big advantage that I find with the iPod is that you can put it on shuffle and listen to an unexpected selection of music from a collection the listener already approves of in random order.  This adds the element of occasional small surprises.  Would you want to put a Kindle on shuffle even if you could?  Of course not.  What would that be anyway?  Random chapters or even pages of books thrown at you one after another, each out of context and therefore without meaning?  No.  That’s an absurd process, even though I am sure that there are a few people out there who would find it quite keen.

So there you have it.  The iPod and the Kindle are not in any way analogous.  And further, the humble book has certain other advantages over electronic readers that just aren’t going to go away.  For example, if you leave your book on a bus, your entire library doesn’t go with it.  You can run over a book with a car, and it will probably still be readable.  And your book is never going to run out of electricity when you’re trying to read at the beach or on the bus or at the airport or on a plane or in a park or in any of another thousand sorts of places where recharging a battery is difficult or impossible.

No, the humble book is a sturdier piece of technology than the publishing paranoiacs would have you believe.

But back to the development of the publishing industry.  Unlike the newspaper industry, whose future is going to end up almost entirely online, publishing houses have a future in producing traditional books.  The publishers who are in for trouble in the coming years are the giants.  They are the dinosaurs of the industry and a meteor is heading for the Gulf of Mexico.  They will die because they have become corporatized and are run by nimrods with business degrees instead of people who are passionate about books.  Like the owners of baseball teams, they compete with each other by spending too much money up front on talents whose past performances are no guarantee of future success.  They tie up too much money in paying advances–even to lower-tier authors–that will take them years to recoup in an industry where every book published is a crapshoot.  They have become moribund and top-heavy and too dependent on bestsellers.  They have no idea what readers want or how to attract new customers.  Every now and then, they get lucky and publish something new that strikes a chord with the populace at large, such as the Harry Potter series or The Da Vinci Code, and then they proceed to flog the living daylights out of it and start trying to find every clone of that thing that they can in order to publish it, regardless of its value.  They look at the community of readers as a bunch of suckers instead of as a pool of customers.  And hucksterism is not replacement for knowledge, passion, and guts.

And so the big houses may die, one-by-one.  Perhaps some of the imprints that have been gobbled up by conglomerates will be spun off again, and Viking and Knopf and others of the old vanguard will be left to roam the landscape unfettered.  It’s the smart way for these companies to go, to break up their conglomerations and to let what are now known as imprints go back to being smaller, independent publishing houses.

Because the future of publishing is with the independents.  That’s where its past was, too, and the era of these huge firms is an anomaly and not the norm.  The smaller publishers can’t throw around money, but they do have flexibility.  Since they cannot pay large advances, they must work with their authors as partners, rather than as pets or possessions, and since they cannot afford a large number of failures, they have to work that much harder to make of each title a success.    They do what they do for love, not for prestige or an expense account or for a meeting with a high-powered parasite who calls himself an agent.  They know that publishing is not a business, but a quest, that it is not an industry, but a calling.

Even venerable Random House started as a couple of guys who “were going to publish a few books on the side at random” and not as a publishing titan.  It is a business that has been left a hulking shadow of itself by mere corporatism, and it shall be reclaimed by those who should be running it:  the lovers.

The New Middle Ages

[W]e are in the beginning of the new Middle Ages, and the division among nations is finished. I mean, within the Western world. To me the world is no more divided vertically with barriers. The world is divided horizontally. You see what I mean? You have the world, or the nation, of the artist, and then you have the nation of the farmers; you have the nation of the businesspeople.

May I tell you something? There is more connection between a businessman from Shanghai and a businessman from New York than between a farmer from Shanghai and a businessman from Shanghai. You understand what I mean about this division of the world? Today, if you talk to a French farmer–well, believe me, the conversation will be very much the same as the conversation with a farmer in Ohio. Very much. But if you talk to an American artist and to an American banker, you will find two citizens of two different nations.–Jean Renoir, 1960

I came across this quote yesterday, and it is still sitting with me. I think it’s an intriguing idea and suggestion that we are living in the new Middle Ages. It seems to me true on a gut level.

I’ve worked in the corporate world, and business people from all over the world do constitute their own sort of society. They become a tribe based on fundamental understandings. They have similar, if not, in fact, the same goals and ideals. They bind themselves to one another with buzz words and jargon and modes of dress. This is the point of getting an MBA these days. It is a way of joining a particular club, one in which the ritual of hazing has been reduced to learning particular kinds of advanced math and obtaining a particular degree and the secret handshake becomes the performance of tricks on spreadsheets and the murmuring of certain clichés and attitudes.

Of course, there are finer strata to be observed. There are salesman and bureaucrats, managers and workers. There are the people who leave the mess and the people who clean up after.

I now work in the academic world and the same behaviors exhibit themselves. I work as an administrator, and there is a gulf that separates the faculty from the staff. And there are cultural forces at work on both sides of that divide. Each side has its own goals and vocabulary, its own sense of mission and purpose.

I think that much of this is neither good nor bad, but natural and instinctive. People by their nature seek packs to join and tribes to identify with. And these various social strata have always functioned. However, in this global society that has been developing over the last century or more, the identification of members of different social groups with members of similar social groups in other nations has become simpler, easier, and more fulfilling.

However much some people might not want to admit it, the world community is slowly evolving into something transnational. Satellite images render the pretense of borders nonsensical. Digital communications shrink the globe even more than telecommunications and radio and television signals did. Technology escapes barriers and crosses divides, swept along, more and more, by the pursuit of a beautiful dollar. And all these changes happen at a speed that is beyond the ability of traditional national governments to keep up with.

Now, I’m not saying that some transnational supergoverment would be any more efficient in dealing with these problems, although it might be able to assure technological uniformity. And, despite the fears of such in some quarters, there are no signs of a true transnational government emerging anytime soon. Still, if the model of the Middle Ages does hold true, the rise of one would be almost inevitable. For Europe in the Middle Ages had such a government. It was known as the Roman Catholic Church.

Unintended Consequences

Late last week, I was going to write a quick something about the environment and how we screw it up even when we don’t mean to. I was inspired by this story in The New York Times, which tells of a concern that several noted environmental scientists have concerning the production of biofuels. Apparently, once you do all the math, producing biofuels actually puts more pollution into the atmosphere than petrofuels do.

However, I could never really get myself going on the thing because I didn’t feel like writing something dour and terrible. So, I put it aside. And then, tonight, I quite incidentally came across the the perfect example of unintended consequences, courtesy of Stephen Fry and QI. Enjoy:

My Latest iPod Victory

On a whim, a few weeks back, I added the contents of All Things Firesign–a compilation of pieces that The Firesign Theatre created for NPR’s All Things Considered in 2002–to my iTunes playlist. I wasn’t certain how well this would work and have been pleased to find out that it works perfectly. Since each piece is only a couple of minutes long, I get a little treat of surreal commentary from time-to-time, which is a welcome break from all that tiresome reality that I seem to have to deal with every day.

I started my walk this morning to the accompaniment of a piece called “It’s Saddam Shame,” which presented an interview with al Qaeda’s former PR director, who is now going by the name Mr. Smith. He explains that, when he joined the terrorists, he was called “Fatwah al Jihad,” but that no longer seemed like a useful moniker. Osama bin Laden, who he describes as the Elvis of al Qaeda, was apparently a difficult client. Mr. Smith had proposed a couple of scripts for him, neither of which he went for. The first was for a late night talk show called, “Let’s Talk Terror.” Part of the format would have Osama come out and do “Wahabi standup” featuring jokes like, “What do you get when you cross a fundamentalist with a know-it-all? You get an Ayatoll-you-so.” The second script was for a sitcom called “Just Shoot Him,” in which Osama would be the leader of an underground cell in Hamburg. He would be surrounded by “young fanatics” who would be “falling in love, partying, blowing each other up.” But (in their phrase) “Mr. Too Big for His Turban” would rather do a show called Politically Incomprehensible.

Very funny, and a much better way of undermining Osama than bombing people in distant lands. But let’s not go down that road.

Whether it’s a visit from CNN-No-Evil News or country store proprietors Mutt and Smutt or another case from the tattered checkbook of Nick Danger, Third Eye, each has been a delightful surprise as it greets me. Get the CD and add it to your iPod. You will be rewarded.