The Daily Sabbatical

Though I now feel myself to be a southerner by little more than birth, I have to admit a tendency to seek out and relish southern writers with something approximating a search for kinship.  After his last book of short stories landed him on the shortlist for the Pen/Faulkner award and his novel Serena was one of the most lauded books of the year, I thought it time to check out the Appalachian poet and author, Ron Rash.  In the end I wasn’t disappointed so much as underwhelmed.

Serena is the story of the Pembertons and the swath they cut through the forests and communities of Depression-era North Carolina.  Pemberton and Serena, his wife, are logger-barons, ruthlessly indifferent to the toll they are taking on the environment and on human life in their ambitious grasp for power and wealth.  The body count of then novel is high, starting on the second or third page when Pemberton guts the father of a girl pregnant with his child.  In retrospect, this death will seem one of the most reasonable of the novel’s killings, and if the husband seems cold he is a kitten in comparison to his wife, whose singular drive is the engine at the novel’s center.

Rash’s novel is an entertaining read that definitely seems timely given the self-and-other-destructive selfishness that seems to be the rising picture of Wall Street.  Nevertheless, in the end its morality tale is a bit obvious.  Serena is such an extreme character that one is at a loss as to what really beats within her breast, and her husband’s shows of mercy at certain points in the novel do no more than open up cracks that reveal little beyond them.   Rash tempers the seriousness by introducing a sort of chorus of loggers who crack wise and philosophical in the background, but it’s hard to feel that one’s understanding is deepend by those comic moments–funny as they sometimes are.

Serena is not a bad book, by any means.  But it shows its seams a little too clearly for my taste, both in the form and the point of its construction.  At times I felt this was intentional–that Rash was trying to create a faithful homage to Greek tragedy, for example.  At other times, I wasn’t so sure and I ultimately don’t think it matters.  Serena does what it does, and it does it pretty well–but that’s not enough to earn it a home on my top shelf.

Somehow this story from the NYT tickled me.  For about a century, because of stop motion photography, it has been known that animals walk starting with the forward motion of their left hind leg, followed by left fore, then right hind, then right foreleg.  (I did not know this, and I have questions about starting on the left–do they always do that?  But nevermind.)  Turns out that in a large selection (around 50%) of cartoons, toys, artistic depictions, and even museum exhibits, the positioning of the legs is wrong.  While I don’t blame the creator of Marmaduke, the Finnish museum has egg on their face.

I recently read a story by Rick Bass in the 2008 Pushcart Prize anthology, my favorite book almost every year. I’d definitely heard of Bass–he’s in the pantheon of America’s short story writers–but till then I had never read him. It was a story about boys in Texas trying to turn a buck buying cattle, and I almost wept with laughter. I resolved to check this guy out, and though this story was from his new collection, The Lives of Rocks, anal retent that I am I had to start with his first book, The Watch, published in 1989. I was not disappointed.
Though Bass’s stories are often humorous, he is not a humor writer ala David Sedaris. The humour in his stories is a natural outgrowth of the voices of his characters, or their sideways perception of the events around them. (This as opposed to Sedaris, who I always feel is lying to me.) Bass is from Texas, so many of his stories are set here, but he feels more Southern than many Texas writers–more like Barry Hannah, perhaps. His characters are often just hanging on, trying to survive from day to day and to make sense out of the messes around them, but they are rarely desperate.  Rather, they accept the world that is theirs in a factual manner, and the distance between that factual manner and the often absurd situation is what generates a good deal of the humor.

Witness the first paragraph of the first story in the collection, “Mexico”:

“Kirby’s faithful.  He’s loyal: Kirby has fidelity.  He has one wife, Tricia.  The bass’s name is Shack.  The fish is not in an acquarium.  It’s in the swimming pool that Kirby built, out in his and Tricia’s front yard.”

This almost reads as notes for a story, but instead it sets the tempo and tone in a way that completely hooked me, and told me that the world I was entering was skewed, but that this was just to be accepted as part of the situation.

Bass’ grasp of voice is just masterful.  Check the start my favorite story in the collection, “Cats and Students, Bubbles and Abysses:”

“I got a roommate, he’s tally and skiny, when we get into arguments he says “I went to Millsaps,” uses the word like what he thinks a battering ram sounds like.  He’s a real jerk.  I could break both his arms just like that! if I wanted to, I’ve got a degree in English Literature from Jackson State.  I was the only white on campus, I can’t use “I went to Jackson State” like a battering ram, but I can break both his arms.”

Great stuff.  Reminds me a bit of Barthelme the Great and the late, sad David Foster Wallace.

Check this guy out.  It looks like he’s been pretty consistent over the years.  I’ll read everything the dude has written.

Jacob Weisburg lists his top 25 Bushisms on Slate.

My favorite of the moment:

15. “It’s important for us to explain to our nation that life is important. It’s not only life of babies, but it’s life of children living in, you know, the dark dungeons of the Internet.”—Arlington Heights, Ill., Oct. 24, 2000

Researchers have found that patients who played the computer game Tetris soon after a trauma suffered less emotional scarring as a result.  The Tetris patients were significantly less likely to experience flashbacks, for example, in the week following the traumatic event.

No evidence, so far, that playing Grand Theft Auto has the same effect.

It’s time for a rant.

I am an avid downloader of music that I do not pay for. Only occasionally do I feel even a twinge of guilt about this. I felt such a twinge recently. So, good citizen that I am, I investigated the possibility of actually paying for downloaded music. I found, to my great chagrin, really, that there is no way I am going to pay for downloaded music at this point.

Let me explain.

First, something about myself. I am, perhaps, not the RIAA’s picture of the mp3 hungry internet hoodlum. I buy a lot of CDs. I also buy a lot of vinyl. I don’t know how much I have, but it’s in the thousands of albums. My stereo is worth more than my car. So, I am not averse to spending money on music, but I am very serious about the quality of that music. So, why steal?

Put simply, the record industry and their retail partners simply are not treating the digital age seriously. Or rather, they are treating it seriously, but only as an opportunity to seriously screw the consumer. Let’s take a look.

Take, for example, one of the best albums of last year, Bon Iver’s For Emma Forever Ago. On Amazon, I can buy this album on CD for $11.49. Now, let’s go to ITunes. First, to do this, I have to download a bloated piece of software onto my computer. So before I even start, I’m paying a cost I don’t pay at Amazon, and that I certainly don’t have to pay if I steal the music. But, then, the music is cheaper. A mere $7.99. (For what it’s worth, this is an example favorable to ITunes. The best album of the year, by Deerhunter, can be bought as a double album on Amazon for less than it can be bought on ITunes.)

If I download from ITunes, what I get is a DRM encoded file that I can only install on five computers, and that only plays on certain devices. Already, this is simply unacceptable. Between my wife and I we have four computers and two IPods. At our current rate, we’ll probably replace a computer every two years. This means that somewhere down the line, even if not now, DRM will prevent me from using my own music on my own computer. Not acceptable. Fortunately, as of yesterday it appears that Apple is stopping this nonsense, so that’s a step in the right direction. It hasn’t happened yet, though, so we’ll see if the price goes up when it does. At this point, however, ITunes is a nonstarter.

Amazon offers downloads as well, so let’s take a look there. For $8.49, Amazon will give me a download of the album at 256kbs. This is a pretty high quality mp3, but it is not cd quality. Mp3 is compressed format that does not preserve all of the data. Put simply, mp3s come in various qualities, depending on how much data is lost, and the higher the kbs number the less that is lost. The difference between a 256kbs recording and a cd of the same music is, in fact, audible. (In general, the sound of a mp3 is noticeably thinner than the cd sound.) So, I am saving three dollars, but I am getting an inferior product. Still, 256kbs is pretty good, so perhaps the $3 discount is fair. But I don’t only lose quality, I also don’t get the CD insert. This is minor in the case of Bon Iver, since there isn’t much on the insert, but it’s still art and information I’m not getting. The loss is more significant if I want to buy, say, Andras Schiff’s first volume of Beethoven’s piano sonatas. That insert contains a valuable essay and interview with the pianist. For an opera, of course, the CD comes with a libretto, which is indispensable. So, missing the insert is not always a minor thing.

Still, I have to say that saving $3 still sounds pretty good, and the insert is not always so important. But there is an important loss with the download, over and above the quality and the insert: with an mp3 I have no resale value. Let’s say that down the road it turns out I don’t really care for Bon Iver as much as I first thought. If I own the CD, I can see that album on half.com for (at the point of writing) $10! That means that I can recoup a significant portion of my losses if the album turns out to be a dud or if I weary of it. If that happens I’m out only $1.50. With the mp3, I’m out the full $7.99. The $3 savings isn’t sounding so good now.

Admittedly, usually one is out more than $1.50 when one sells a cd, but the point is general. When you buy a CD, you have an asset that retains some value. You can sell it when you are hard up for cash or when you simply want different music. Not so with an mp3. To make the loss more tangible, think of the physical CD like a coupon that is worth anywhere between three and ten dollars, that can be used when you grow tired of the CD. So, buying the CD at Amazon gives you better quality, liner notes, and a coupon that is worth $10. The mp3 is by far the worse deal.

There are other options out there. Emusic is a very good one. For $25 a month you can get 100 downloads—making the cost about 25 cents per track. That means the Bon Iver album can be had for about $2.25. That’s looking better, but there are two problems. First, you have to download 100 tracks each month to really be getting that price. If you only download Bon Iver one month, that album just cost you $25. Second, the quality at Emusic is about 192kbs. That is a difference that anyone can hear on almost any equipment, and it is particularly grating on good equipment. For me, at least, 192kbs is not worth paying for.

So the basic deal is this: when you pay for downloaded music online, you are typically getting inferior sound quality, you are not getting all of the information and art that comes with a cd booklet, and you have no resale value. The last bit is the often overlooked clincher—the resale value alone is usually worth more than the difference between the retail cd price and the download price! That means, essentially, that you are paying at least the same price for an inferior product when you pay for downloaded music.

The real kick in the ass is, it really doesn’t have to be this way. Record companies and retailers can enjoy much lower production and distribution costs in a world of downloaded music. I’m not privy to the numbers, of course, but as cheap as they are, cds, jewel cases and inserts do cost something, as does shipping and handling them. My guess is that there is at least one middleman who no longer needs to be paid. I also strongly suspect that the cost of promotion can go down significantly, since the retailers themselves do much of the promoting with samples, recommended purchases, and inventive search engines. There is an untapped world of market innovations out there that are simply not being utilized.

Everyone can be a winner at this point. The fact that everyone isn’t a winner is merely a sign that someone is refusing to adapt, and my suspicion is that rampant music theft is one of the responses to that. There will always have to be safeguards against digital piracy, but the music industry has little right to complain unless they offer a truly reasonable response in the form of a well priced product of reasonable quality.

(Note: I realize I have not defended the morality of digital piracy. It obviously doesn’t follow that because the music companies are offering an inferior product that anything goes, including theft. I do think that this ethical issue cannot be understood, however, unless it is clear why people should not be asked to pay the price they are currently asked to pay for the product they are stealing. A defense of that theft will have to wait for another occasion.)