Mark Hoobler

Haywire (2012, Steven Soderbergh): Daddy's Girl is Not Happy...

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 20:52:00 +0000

Far less allusive or puzzle-complex as their collaboration on 1999's new-wavy The Limey, Steven Soderbergh's and Lem Dobbs' Haywire is a frenetic concept piece, dirty pulp layered over with the patina of cinema art house, another descendant of John Boorman's 1967 Point Blank. The Limey was a searcher revenge tale, with a rough Cockney Terence Stamp as a father looking to avenge his daughter's death. Kicking her way through various set-pieces in Barcelona, Dublin, 'Upstate New York' and New Mexico, Gina Carano is Mallory Kane, a daddy's girl who doesn't need her dad's help. 'It would be a mistake to think of her as a woman' one of the film's evil men tells another of the film's evil men towards the end of this cinema-cyclone. But underestimate her, they all do. Carano isn't Meryl Streep, nor meant to be (I am pretty sure she does her own stunts and motorcycle riding) but you knew that going in, right? Her physicality is something to see, in a diner in New York or a hotel in Dublin; When she slips out of her spiky heels in the hallway before entering a suite with Michael Fassbinder, you know, intuitively, it is time for room service. And Haywire is much better intuited than thought out. Just enjoy the deer through the windshield; don't spend too much time dissecting the deus ex machina. Along with Fassbinder, you can see Ewan MacGregor, Antonio Banderas, Bill Paxton, Channing Tatum, and Michael Douglas as the boys helping her out, or, more likely, in her way.

Freud's Love Letters

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 20:32:00 +0000

To his twenty-two year-old fiancee, Martha Bernays, in 1882:

"If you insist on strict correctness in the use of words, then I most confess that you are not beautiful. But I was not flattering you in what I said...What I meant to convey was how much the magic of your being expresses itself in your countenance and your body...I myself have always been insensitive to formal beauty. But if there is any vanity left in your little head I will not conceal from you that some people declare you to be beautiful, even strikingly so. I have no opinion in the matter."

To Martha in June 1884, after he had begun experimenting with cocaine:

"I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are forward you shall see who is stronger, a little girl who doesn't eat enough or a big strong man with cocaine in his body. In my last serious depression I took cocaine again and a small dose lifted me to the heights in wonderful fashion. I am just now collecting the literature for a song of praise to this magical substance."

"Then we came to the end..."

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 05:48:00 +0000

"Then we came to the end of another dull and lurid year. Lights were strung across the front of every shop. Men selling chestnuts wheeled their smoky carts. In the evenings the crowds were immense and traffic built to a tidal roar. The santas of Fifth Avenue rang their little bells with an odd sad delicacy, as if sprinkling salt on some brutally spoiled piece of meat. Music came from all stores in gingles, chants and hosannas, and from the Salvation Army bands came the martial trumpet lament of ancient Christian legions. It was strange to hear in that time and place, the smack of cymbals and high collared drums, a suggestion that children were being scolded for a bottomless sin, and it seemed to annoy people. But the girls were lovely and undismayed, shopping in every mad store, striding through those magnetic twilights like drum majorettes, tall and pink, bright packages cradled to their tender breasts. The blind man’s German shepherd slept through it all."

-Don DeLillo, Americana

"And don't we...

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 02:38:00 +0000

“And don’t we – as children and perhaps even later – romanticize cheap movie stereotypes, endowing them with the attributes of those figures in the arts who touch us imaginatively? Don’t all our experiences in the arts and popular arts that have more intensity than our ordinary lives tend to merge in another imaginative world? And movies, because they are such an encompassing, eclectic art are an ideal medium for combining our experiences and fantasies from life, from all the arts, and from our jumbled memories of both." - Pauline Kael, reviewing Band of Outsiders

An Author At His Own Expense

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 18:35:00 +0000

"To be an author - unless one is a poet, and in addition a dramatist, or one writes textbooks or in some other way is an author in connection with public office - is about the poorest paid, the least secure, and just about the most thankless job there is. If there is some individual who has the capability of being an author and if he is also fortunate enough to have private means, then he becomes an author at his own expense. This however, is quite appropriate; there is nothing more to be said about it. In that way the individual in his work will love his idea, the nation to which he belongs, the cause he serves, the language he as an author has the honor to write. Indeed, this is how it will be where there is harmony between the individual and the nation, which in turn in the given situation, will be, somewhat appreciative of this individual.

Whether the opposite of this has in any way been my experience..."

- Kierkegaard, On My Work As An Author, 1849

A Letter from the Govt. of Zanesvillle Oh. to Terry Thompson

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 01:31:00 +0000

Dear Mr. Thompson:

Thank you so much for applying for a permit to keep exotic dangerous animals on your 'preserve' in our humble duchy! (We trust this missive will find you well in the maximum security lock-up in Columbus.)

Admittedly we were concerned given your history of brushes with the law (not limited to - of all things! - animal cruelty!) However we do understand how important it is for a rural Ohioan to keep a Siberian Tiger and Grizzly Bear, among others, in cages on your 'preserve'. We are somewhat concerned how you will care for these noble beasts from your jail cell, however the $125 fee per annum will certainly help fill the Zanesville coffers! The pottery economy needs to putter along.
Godspeed to you sir!
(Should you decide to take your own life and let the animals free, please contact us in advance. Lol! )
With best regards,
The Sovereign Government of Zanesville, Oh.
(P.S. you were due in court to stand for charges of drunken disorderly conduct some months ago. Let us know if you are not able to make it.)

Joe Henry - Life Beyond Trembling, with Sticks & Stones

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 22:31:00 +0000

"It's a funny thing to live with both hunger and satisfaction - fear and consolation - bouncing within your bones in equal measure, like the opposite ends of a tightrope walker's long pole: you can sight along one end to the other and sense in its curved but strong line the truth of both impulses, bobbing and working to keep you upright along the trembling wire.

I have wanted to believe such trembling behind me; that I could leave it like quarters and dimes on a starched white tablecloth, a meager tip but nonetheless an acceptable observance of time spent alive and nursing at the thin bones of the scrawny rabbit that my desire had conjured and conquered.

But no there is no life beyond trembling, no true consolation for desire, because desire does not wish to be consoled, only sustained and held in that terrible and holy state of longing. Like an empty can rigged with nails and wires and hooked up to a battery, its buzzing is the possibility that a rabbit is indeed on its way, and may even bring a carrot with him.

So I sit on the beach and wait; smoke, laugh and remember. It is bright and warm but won't be for much longer; and such anticipation is the only thing I have ever had any use for in broad daylight"

-Joe Henry, liner notes ("Life Beyond Trembling") on "Reverie"

In the office in which I work

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 21:24:00 +0000

“In the office in which I work there are five people of whom I am afraid. Each of these five people is afraid of four people (excluding overlaps), for a total of twenty, and each of these twenty is afraid of six people, making a total of one hundred and twenty people who are feared by a least one person. Each of these one hundred and twenty people is afraid of the other one hundred and nineteen, and all of these one hundred and forty-five people are afraid of the twelve men at the top who helped found and build the company and now own and direct it. All of these twelve men are elderly now and drained by time and success and energy and ambition. Two of them know what I do and recognize me, because I have helped them in the past, and they have been kind enough to remember me, although not, I’m sure, by name. They inevitably smile when they see me and say: “How are you?” (I inevitably nod and respond “Fine.”) Since I have little contact with these twelve men at the top and see them seldom, I am not really afraid of them. But most of the people I am afraid of in the company are.”

-Joseph Heller,

Something Happened

The Thing That's Not the Movies

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 20:30:00 +0000

"It felt real, the place was paradoxically real, bodies moving musically, barely moving, twelve-tone, things barely happening, cause and effect so drastically drawn apart that it seemed real to him, the way all the things in the physical world that we don't understand are said to be real.

The door slid open and there was a stir of mild traffic at the far end of the floor, people getting on the escalator, a clerk swiping credit cards, a clerk tossing items into large sleek museum bags. Light and sound, wordless monotone, an intimation of life-beyond, world-beyond, the strange bright fact that breathes and eats out there, the thing that's not the movies."

- Don DeLillo, Point Omega

The Gypsy and the Hobo

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 00:24:00 +0000

The Mad Men Without Qualities

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Fri, 27 May 2011 21:48:00 +0000

Eric Hobsbawm has written: "For 80 percent of humanity the Middle Ages ended suddenly in the 1950s; or perhaps better still , they were felt to end in the 1960s."* Probably accurate, but if you were to look for where the remaining 20 percent was most concentrated in opposition, you would most likely find no more perfect geographical expression than an island off of the coast of the United States called Manhattan. By the 1960s, if not before, the cultural and economic (they tend to go hand-in-hand) dominance that had belonged to London or Paris now belonged to New York City. The English-speaking (but not 'British') WASP was setting the pace, even if they were leading at a historical game that they really did not understand.

I just watched the first episode of season 4 of Mad Men and was reminded how much I liked to whole show, the whole idea of the show, the whole way it dissects this particular era, the White Male ascendant, head of his own household and telling you the way you need to think about yourself in yours. This is probably one of my favorite pieces of television production, or, as they are known to us without cable: "TVonDVD." Watching them in compressed order (if not actually just over the course of one weekend) as the format encourages, strengthens one's opinion that the increased quality of recent television shows are giving the Old American Novel a run for its metaphorical money; the range of characterization and individual psychological development or multiple characters that are allowed on high-quality shows like Mad Men and The Wire or Freaks and Geeks (which I am currently midway through) are usually absent from 'The Cinema' because it is hamstrung by its form: 2 hours, 2 1/2 hours if the director pushes it. Everyone is familiar with the phenomenon of reading a 300 page novel, then seeing the 2-hour movie and feeling that something is 'missing' from the film or the characters. That something is almost always the rang of charac-well, exactly what I said above - that is afforded the reader of a novel that a film (most at least, it should be noted I am hardly an enemy of the movies) cannot find in its arsenal keeping to the 2 hour time-frame.

I don't think there is any doubt that there has been a higher level of quality television in the last ten years or so, than the ten previous. Of the shows I have watched, two in particular have stood out: David Simon's The Wire and Matthew Weiner's Mad Men. As good as The Wire is, I am much more a fan of Weiner's Mad Men. Simon is still the polemical journalist, and sometimes I think he sacrifices art for politics. I find Mad Men to be both a better aesthetic project, and a more in-depth look at the mores of the time, the 'battle of the sexes', when affulent white guys ruled the street, Madison or otherwise, during Hobsbawm's 'Golden' 1960s. I find the cipher of Don Draper at the morally ambiguous center of the show, a white male who, with his own twisted code, twists and claws and lies and smiles his way into a whole other identity, one of the super affulent - both economically, but more importantly to me, culturally, to be one of the more important characters of recent times. Others may disagree. (But hopefully not with Hamm's performance in the role.)

I have been wanting to write about the show for quite a long time, both because I have been trying to circle my own feelings about it and also I am almost preternaturally lazy. It has definitely been one of the aesthetic touchstones of the past couple years of my life. Like most things I like, I over-think it, so I think I am just going to stab at it in pieces. Or episodically, if you will. Season 3's 'The Gyspy and the Hobo' is one of my favorites, so I will probably start there. But be forewarned now: I am going to tell you what happens towards the end of season 3. Spoiler alert.

But next post. I need a nap.

*The Age of Extremes (1994)

Sleepwalking through History

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 22:38:00 +0000

"After ten weeks of additional strenuous negotiations with the Iranians, Jimmy Carter, now sleepless for two nights and worn to the marrow, received word just after six-thirty a.m. that a final agreement had been arranged for the release of the hostages in Tehran. At seven o' clock, he placed a call to the official presidential guest residence to tell his successor the joyous news, but the call was taken by an aide of Reagan's who said that the governor had had a long night, was sleeping, and could not be disturbed.

"You're kidding," Carter said.

"No, sir, I'm not," the aide replied.

As dawn began to break, the ashen-faced president jotted down what had happened in his meticulous minute-by-minute log. Outside the White House, all over Washington, limousine chauffeurs, gown-fitters, sous-chefs, and gofers awoke to begin making final preparations for the most sumptuous presidential inauguration in American history."

- Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan

The End of Bookstores? (8) Joseph-Beth Survives! (and eBook wars continue...)

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 23:26:00 +0000

We at markhoobler.blogspot (meaning me, Mark Hoobler) are very happy to announce that the Cincinnati Joseph-Beth bookstore found a successful bidder in its private auction on Wednesday; the store will remain open and continue to serve the community. In recent weeks I have been in the store more often than I have been in the past year or so, and had somewhat forgotten the pure pleasure of browsing that can only be found in a real 'bricks and mortar' bookstore. This bookstore holds a special place in my personal history and I am glad it will continue to do so.

In related news, the eBook market-share wars continue. Today, Amazon did a full about-face by announcing that Kindle users would be able to borrow 'library' eBooks on their device. The move is widely seen as Amazon's attempt to try to keep pace with Apple's iPad and Barnes & Noble's Nook; these are more robust 'readers', most notably in the fact that they are in color, while Amazon's Kindle remains black & white. Users had been able to borrow library eBooks on the iPad and Nook, but not the Kindle. Previously Amazon had said they would not allow users to borrow library books on their device.

But, as noted in the NYT article, publishers continue to hold back somewhat with eBooks in libraries. Of the 'Big Six' publishers, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan still do not allow libraries to 'lend' their eBooks at all, and last month Harper Collins announced libraries would only be able to be 'checked out' 26 times before the library had to buy the eBook again.

Noli me tangere

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 05:32:00 +0000

"Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, hélas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame."

The Corrections

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 00:21:00 +0000

Correction: March 25, 2007

A review on Feb. 25 about “Remainder,” by Tom McCarthy, rendered incorrectly the name of the test that distinguishes androids from humans in “Blade Runner,” the 1982 science-fiction film based on a novel by Philip K. Dick, whose work was compared with McCarthy’s. In printed references to the film, it is Voight-Kampff, not “void comp.” (In Dick’s novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” it is spelled Voigt-Kampff, without the “h.”)

- The New York Times Book Review

(Otherwise Liesl is correct: I second the second paragraph of her review: "What fun it is when a crafty writer plays cat and mouse with your mind, when you can never anticipate his next move and when, in any case, he knows all the exits to the maze and has already blocked them. If you allow yourself to admire the walls, the bewildering dead ends, the doubling back and the twists, then the sensation of entrapment can fascinate. You find yourself exhilarated by your confusion, wanting to be caught — if only to learn, as the fangs sink in, what the chase was actually for.")

Due Date (Todd Phillips, 2010)

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 01:14:00 +0000

What's wrong with Due Date?
It's more than just the fact that the premise, and even whole bits of the screenplay, are cobbled out of wholesale pieces of Planes, Trains & Automobiles and Midnight Run. You might be able to get past that. Due Date has more than its share of funny moments (unfortunately, like too many films these days, you can find them all in this extended "behind-the-scenes" trailer.) Galifinakis has quite a few good scenes, but Downey Jr. and Galifinakis rarely have any good scenes together as actors; they don't have much chemistry, or Downey's character was written so thinly, as just an uptight too-straight man to Galifinakis's clown (and this vehicle movie was far more of a vehicle for Zach despite his second billing). Except for very few scenes, notably an acting workshop in a rest-stop restroom, they never connect.
There are funny scenes with Juliette Lewis, and a small unbilled but memorable scene with Danny McBride (TV's "Kenny Powers"). The script works very hard - far too hard during the third act - to make the guys in this buddy movie buddies. But it never quite pulls it off. They don't come anywhere close to the chemistry of DeNiro and Grodin in Midnight Run, a film I could not keep out of my head as I watched this one.

The End of Bookstores (7)

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 02:12:00 +0000

“It is difficult to establish any relationship between the price of books and the value one gets out of them. ‘Books’ includes novels, poetry, textbooks, works of reference, sociological treatises and much else, and length and price do not correspond to one another…There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one’s mind and alter one’s whole attitude whole attitude to life, books that one dips into but never reads through, books that one reads at a single sitting and forgets a week later: and the cost in terms of money may be the same in each case…With prices as they now are, I am spending far more on tobacco than I do on books”– Orwell, Books vs. Cigarettes

Orwell was writing in 1946, a year or two after Pynchon’s fictional Tyrone Slothrop got schooled in war-torn Europe by a blackmarketeer on the future of both information and cigarettes as a means of exchange:

“…‘What is it you’re after?’

…‘Uh, Information?’...

A tragic sigh. ‘Information. What’s wrong with dope and women? Is it any wonder the world’s gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?’

‘I thought it was cigarettes.’

‘You dream…It’ll get easier. Someday it’ll all be done by machine. Information machines. You are the wave of the future.’… ”

As Nicole Krauss points out, while the stunning triumph of the eBook during just the last year to 18 months* has possibly put the nail in the coffin of the bookstore, the background to its increasing problems stretch back to the rise of the Internet, to Pynchon’s ‘information machines.’ From bricks ‘n’ mortar to bytes ‘n’ monitors. The whole discussion of the demise of consumer bookstores points to a larger discussion about the exponential growth of the information revolution in recent times.

Krauss illustrates her essay with a story of a renting (I assume from a video store!) and a viewing of Hannah and Her Sisters. She points out how many scenes are set in bookstores and record-stores* and laments this cultural loss. But have you ever had this experience. You are watching a film of fairly recent vintage (0r so it seems to you, it’s not black and white), then all of a sudden someone picks up a cell phone the size of a brick, or there is a shot of a ‘computer’ that had those reel-to-reel tapes.

That proscenium has been broken.

*The astute observer - without any schadenfreude - will note this is the exact timeframe when I started working in publishing. At a publisher that didn’t publish too many ‘eBooks.’

*She hedges a bit, I think, when she demurs that no one would take Woody Allen’s portrait of Manhattan as accurate. I think she is taking away too much from her own crusade, in the broad imaginative sense of the creator versus the mapper. No small part of our ‘idea’ of Manhattan – certainly 1970’s Manhattan - is due to Mr. Allen, as much as our ‘ideas’ of Dublin or Prague are due to their literary sons, ‘realistic’ or not. We do not really want realism. We want idealism, be it high-falutin’ philosophy or just escape. That is why, when we are not shopping for others, we go to a bookstore. That is what they are for. Ideality for ourselves and others.

The End of Bookstores? (6)

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 02:31:00 +0000

The changing economy of the last 20 years, the rise of the internet, Amazon, the digitalization of content, the 'eBook', the 'chain' and corporate model of the bookstore have all been blamed, and perhaps, contributed to the problems now facing the bookselling industry.

However, sometimes something as simple as a smart-assed ostrich can be devastating. Hat tip to Ben Vore for pointing out this unfortunate creature HERE.

The End of Bookstores? (5)

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 23:20:00 +0000

Today, a federal judge rejected Google’s $125 million class-action settlement with authors and publishers, delivering a blow to the company’s ambitious plan to build the world’s largest digital library and bookstore.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/23/technology/23google.html

The End of Bookstores? (4)

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 02:47:00 +0000

“Of all of the people that I used to know
Most never adjusted to the great big world
I see them lurking in book stores
Working for the Public Radio
Carrying their babies around in a sack on their back
Moving careful and slow
It's money that matters
Hear what I say
It's money that matters
In the USA
All of these people are much brighter than I
In any fair system they would flourish and thrive
But they barely survive
They eke out a living and they barely survive” – Randy Newman

There used to be this amazing little independent bookstore on Edwards ave in Hyde Park, in the building right next to where that upscale sushi place is now. I love wood with books, and this store had a two-story level where the floor was cut out, just a path jutting out from around the second ‘floor’ of books, both levels nothing but what seemed like continuous rich wood filled with books. I remember going there once and being mesmerized by my find. They had books like the mall bookstores did not. Books like a biography of Goethe that I paid some crazy amount for a paperback version of, just because I liked the idea of Goethe and I liked the idea of me buying a book about Goethe in this bookstore. I still have it*, the wide brown paperback spine with G-o-e-t-h-e spelled in huge letters, and it is one of those books that means more as an object than most of books. It was one of the first books I bought during my pseudo-intellectual self-education. I remember struggling through it sitting in the amazing Midwest May sun on my parents’ porch.

I wish I could remember the name of that bookstore, but I cannot. It was pretty out of the way from my side of town and I think I only made it there once or twice between 1990 and 1993. In late 1993 a larger independent chain called Joseph-Beth opened a much larger store a few blocks up the street. Like I said in an earlier post, I can distinctly remember the outcry, generated mostly by this smaller bookstore about how the big chains were moving in and killing community businesses. There were flyers left on cars and stapled to telephone poles, protests of righteous indignation.

To no avail. The bookstore whose name I cannot remember closed its doors at least within a year, I think.

But I liked Joseph-Beth too. I rarely made it over to the Eastside of town to browse, when Borders and B&N were much closer, but I would venture there once in a while. The store had a cozy feel, with a fake fire burning in a large fireplace by the fiction and literature section.

After I moved back from Manhattan in 2003, I got an apt on the Eastside of town, just a few blocks from Joseph-Beth, and a job at Fidelity Investments that I absolutely hated. Joseph-Beth became my comfort place. I would go after work or at night or on a weekend aftenoon and browse the shelves and hope I would run into a pretty girl also looking for books. Like in the movies. Except it was not the movies and I never did meet a girl. But I did still love the store.

Soon I made the fateful decision that I should apply for a job there. I loved the place, right? Why not work at a place that you love and you love what they do? I applied – there was a test to see how many authors you can match to book titles; between working at the library for seven years and my own dilettantism, I knew all the authors, even the kids’ ones! I aced it! I got hired! My book knowledge paid off in a job choice!! I was making about $17,000 a year in 2005!!

But I did love it for the longest time. It was fun. The first two years I worked there rank with the first two years I worked at an auction gallery in New York, in ‘job’ terms: I remember them fondly. It was great to be around books. It was great to talk to customers about books. It was great to work with so many people of so many different ages who were there for one reason: they loved books (and obviously not money). There were some who came and went quickly, who were just working there to have some sort of job. But for most part everyone was there because that is what they wanted to be doing. The General Manager was boisterous and animated, an over-ambulatory blur of book-selling motion. It is somewhat coincidental that he was(is) a huge fan of Nicole Krauss, whose article has me writing my bookstore memories this week. He set some sort of hand-selling record for Krauss’s History of Love. We sold that blue book in such bulk not because it was on the best-seller list, or because the publisher was really pushing it, but because he loved the book and he wanted everyone to read it.

Publisher reps came twice a year for early morning breakfasts where they talked up the upcoming season’s titles, and then laid out a buffet of books for us to take home gratis. I do not like getting up early. At all. But I was always excited for these events, pulling up to the store in pitch darkness to get free books. And if you wanted a book that was being published, like say, Tony Judt’s collection of essays Reappraisals, you could email the Penguin rep and she would send you a copy. So what if your car got repossessed because you couldn’t make the payments. I was getting free books.

I worked at Joseph-Beth for four years eventually being promoted to Operations Manager. And the first two or three were some of the best of my life. But the closer I got to the management of the store, and the more I worked with the head management at the distribution center, the more I realized that while I might like the sausage, I did not necessarily like the way sausage was made. For some people, this can roll off your back. Not so much for me and my temperament. My comfort zone had become anything but, and it was obvious to all around. It was time for me to go.

For many years when I lived in Cincinnati, I had applied to work at a fairly large publisher numerous times over the years, both before and after I got back from NYC. Just a week after I left Joseph-Beth, I found myself with a job at that publisher. (Along with a few other JBB alumni.) I have been there now for a year and a half. Part of my job deals with eBook production.

Shortly before the holiday season last year, Joseph-Beth Booksellers filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and closed some of their stores in other states. Currently they are slated to come out of bankruptcy in April.

But this week the owner and founder of Joseph-Beth, who has owned the chain since 1986, announced that the chain was on the auction block.

*This was actually just the first volume in Nicholas Boyle’s three volume biography. Volume 1 was published in 1992, Volume 2 in 2000, and we are still waiting on Volume 3.

The End of Bookstores? (3) - eBook Sales Outpacing Hardcover and Mass Market Books for First Time

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 22:11:00 +0000

From Today's Publishers Marketplace:

Pop: AAP eBook Sales Comprise 23.5 Percent of All January Trade, Outpacing Hardcover and Mass Market Books for First Time

The much-anticipated January 2011 AAP ebook sales report shows the spike that many expected: among the 14 publishers who contribute data, wholesale ebook sales jumped to a new all-time high of $69.9 million. As a result, ebooks comprised 23.5 percent of all trade book sales for the month. (In December, ebook sales of $49.5 million comprised just under 8 percent of trade sales.)

That big increase is consistent with the surge of new ereading devices and a traditionally slow month for new print book shipments--and is in step with reports from Sourcebooks that digital sales hit 35 percent in January, and from Bloomsbury USA that ebooks comprised 40 percent that month. (Neither of these companies reports to the AAP.)

For the first time, ebook sales exceeded reported hardcover sales for the month ($49.1 million) and mass market sales ($39 million). eBooks weren't too far behind the month's adult paperback sales of $83.6 million either. Bear in mind, however, that the AAP's pool of reporting ebook publishers grew in January, now including results from Scholastic and Workman, so that data segment is capturing sales that were not previously included.

The increase in ebook sales of $37.5 million still did not match the decline in trade print sales of $50.4 million. The biggest declines came in adult trade paperback (-$21.6 million) and adult mass market (-$17.4 million).

Note that last year there was a surge in January ebook sales with the wave of new readers and then the monthly totals returned to lower levels, and did out outpace those January sales until July. So stay tuned.

The End of Bookstores? (2)

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 03:16:00 +0000

That Mom & Pop video I store I talked about last time is no longer around. There were any number of stores like that all over town at that time, but the national chain Blockbuster put them all out of business. And while there are still Blockbuster stores around, they are dying every day, being replaced by kiosks or NetFlix.* Streaming ‘rented’ movies directy to your television/computer is growing immensely. An entire business – however inconsequential video rental may seem – has ceased to occupy very little physical space in the world. The stores are no longer - as they now refer to physical bookstores in the industry to separate them from e-bookstores - ‘brick-and-mortar.’ It is interesting to recall though, that prior to movies being released on video, the only place they existed was when they played at the cinema or were shown on TV. You were totally at the mercy of these commercial outlets as to when you could see a ‘movie.’ Other than that, to the person, they existed largely only in memory, able to accessed only at the whim of what was at the theatre currently or what was playing on TV.

‘Recorded music’ went through a comparatively longer lifecycle from radio tapes and pressed LP recordings (which in turn gave a prescribed time frame and form to popular music – the ‘album’) to 8-tracks to cassette tapes to CDs to the evanescent MP3. But the results are fairly the same.

The book has a somewhat older provenance than film or recorded music. The road from the printed book to the eBook is measured in centuries. The road to the demise of the bookstore as we have known it, certainly in the last 30-40 years, may not be measured as long. Is it important to separate the book in its mammoth role in world culture from its commercial existence as a salable product? Probably, but it was certainly in its marketplace form – not at a library – that I became so interested in books, and in this little piece I am not going to dwell on the difference.

The eBook is lately vilified as the cause of the bookstore’s demise; certainly Krauss takes it as her starting point. Is it? Perhaps as she states, it is the nail in the coffin. (Someone who I know that works at a large local bookstore told me of many times recently where a ‘customer’ would come into the store and ask for the author and title of a bestselling book, then upon getting the info would remark, “Great, I will add that to my Kindle!”) Amazon and Apple and Google have certainly fought fiercely for marketshare with no physical marketstore. And although the Kindle got off to a slow start, the transformation in the last year or so has been astonishing. They have been remarkably successful and it has caught both the publishing and the bookstore chains off-guard. Barnes & Noble is the only bookstore that developed an eReader of its own and maintains a fairly high-traffic website for both physical and eBooks. Borders was able to do neither, and most analysts blame this for their bankruptcy.

But the publishing and book-wholesaling industry had already been declining during the times I spent haunting those bookstores in the 1990’s. I can remember when publishers stopped publishing all their hardbook books in cloth on the spine or in whole, and switched to paper, they way ‘book club’ books were bound. (Out of some deference to his stature with them, if not outright contractually, Random House continues to publish all of John Updike’s books in cloth.) But with small exceptions the clothbound book was brushed aside by all large publishers – at almost the exact same time - during the 90’s to be replaced by paperbound. The more ‘academic’ books by small or large university presses also began to disappear from the shelves. The most expensive new book I ever bought in a bookstore (outside of college) was Latin Literature: A History, for around $100 at Joseph-Beth sometime in the late 90’s. (No, I am not good with money. And yes, I read it. Some of it.) Barnes & Noble, at one time, had a shelf unit in every store devoted to the Loeb Classical Library (those little red or green book that were written with Latin and Greek on pages facing the English.) Those also disappeared sometime in the mid to late 90’s.

I am sure this is due to many factors. Amazon’s rise during this time cannot be underestimated. As Krauss writes: “Whatever the case, it is an historical fact that the decline of the bookstore and the rise of the Internet happened simultaneously; one model of the order and presentation of knowledge was toppled and superseded by another” I was excited by Amazon as by any other booklover; but for the most part, like so many others, even still today, I still first went to the bookstore to ‘discover’ what I wanted, then went home to purchase it online at a discount. My favorite Amazon vs. Bookstore stratagem is Amazon’s designing their book webpages so long, so that when you print them out you end up having to print 5 pages of paper. This is meant to discourage the all-too common practice of finding what you are looking for on Amazon, then printing out the page and taking it to your bookstore to ask where it is that you might buy it today. (We could sneer at Amazon for knowingly wasting so much paper – were we not talking about the book industry…that is a lot of paper…(of course it is the good kind))

Bookstores began to carry DVDs and music CDs, and while I certainly did not mind these additions, they would and will be subject to the same lifecycle that affected the above-referenced video stores and music stores. Consumers don’t need the bricks and mortar for their 'content delivery', or if they must they can get them at Target at a much higher discount along with their milk, clothes, flat-screen tvs, cat food, over-the-counter medications, prescription medications, area rugs, children’s toys, bath towels, furniture, and that stand-up room light that every college student in the United States owns. And Target carries books too. Books like this one.

To be continued....

*Any company that can capture cutting-edge market share the way NetFlix did, by using the United States Post Office mail system, well, my metaphorical hat is off to you. It will will not be long before you have to tell your children (in your best Patton Oswalt old guy voice) of how you used to wait for the U.S. Mail to get your movies!

The End of Bookstores?

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 00:05:00 +0000

Quite a while back, after failing out of film school (for failing to go to any classes that were not related to film), I found myself back at home living with my parents. I was never one for school, not even for all the reading I did on my own, and as soon as I was away in another city and there was no one to prod me out of bed in the morning at the age of 19 to go to class like there was when I was 18 and at home, I simply did not go. Why would you want to go to a calculus class anyway? I sure didn’t. Tuition was paid for by parents and a scholarship, and it meant nothing to me to squander it. I certainly hadn’t worked for it. I imagined a place where I would go for a few years to learn how to become a big time feature film maker. Would I insert my middle initial in my name in the credits? ‘Written and Directed by Mark L. Hoobler’ or just ‘Mark Hoobler’? These were the questions that occupied me!

That particular piece of daydreaming did not work out. So there I was, in the early 1990s* back at my parents house, 20 years old, and without a job.

After a short while I got a part-time job at the Cincinnati Public Library, where I had worked when I was in high school. I would end up with a full-time position after two years of trying, and work there for seven years, eventually going to the University of Cincinnati at night and some Saturdays to study History and Literature. Later I would move to New York and enroll at NYU.

But this was all a number of years off still, and in the meantime, back at my parents, I had a lot of time on my hands. I spent a good deal of it watching every VHS tape of every feature film that was at the local Mom & Pop video rental store a few blocks from my house. Some more than a few times. I did not read nearly as much as I did when I was in grade school. Once in a while - and I can distinctly remember trying to make it through E. V. Rieu’s prose translation of The Iliad in the Penguin Classics series – I would take out some of the old books I had from my first year of college education that had preceded without me. (I sold back any math books, but I did keep ‘the humanities.’) There was a strong part of me that was tugged by ‘Ideas’ with a capital ‘I’, but I did not find much balm for it in the scattered anthologies and textbooks I brought back from Dayton, Ohio.

About this time something happened that changed that. The large bookstore chains began to move into Cincinnati. I think Barnes & Noble first, then Borders. There were one or two smallish independent bookstores on the Eastside of town, but for the most part it was Waldenbooks and B. Dalton at the mall: Mass market paperbacks and the hardback bestsellers. That was about it. I cannot remember any reaction to when B&N and Borders moved into town, but a few years later, when a large independent chain called Joseph-Beth moved into town, there were flyers circulated by the small bookstores in town maligning the new store, and claiming that it would drive them out of business.

I was only working part-time at the library and still living at home and these stores opened up a new world for me. Suddenly it was more than just what was on the bestseller list today or had been last year; there were these things called ‘trade paperbacks’ that I had never seen before in such sheer scope. There were books by writers that I was familiar with or had heard of, but I had never actually seen their books before, and being still a young man, and very visually oriented, I was attracted just by the books themselves. And while this may seem somewhat superficial (after all, the books that I was entranced by at the bookstores were all at the very library where I currently worked; they were just in the dusty stacks, old editions bound in sturdy library vinyl) it made a big difference to me. I liked the rough-cut pages of a new Knopf hardcover history; I could feel its importance by the way it was made, the important cover art (a classical painting!) a smaller typeface, a specific artful typeface, maybe Electra or Aldus. I wanted Isaiah Berlin’s The Sense of Reality as much for the physical feel and look of the book itself , as for the ideas within. Why was Random House still publishing Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West in two cloth hardbound Borzoi volumes? Well, for me to buy them of course. These books were simply ‘presented’ in a way that they were not at the library. I would buy any number of books based on such spurious tactile and aesthetic criteria.

And buy I did. I was making decent money working even part-time with no overhead, and these bookstores become a sort of home away from home for me. I bought a lot of classics (even read a few) but eventually I settled on the History, Literature (not ‘fiction’ as they called it at Waldenbooks) and Philosophy sections as the ones that intrigued me the most and the ones I constantly came back to, to browse again and again. I was young and on a quest for some sort of meaning. Religion had never really interested me except to be puzzled as to why so many people believed it, and that it sometimes ruined my Sunday mornings. I began to become acquainted with writers who - I felt – had felt that same way that I did. I was particularly attracted to a bizarre character in the history of philosophy named Soren Kierkegaard. His works were being systematically translated in whole for the first time in English and published by Princeton University Press in pretty, primary color volumes. He was as much poet as philosopher. He published books under pseudonyms – sometimes espousing contradictory doctrines. He conflated the search for meaning with a real failed erotic relationship autobiographically inserted into all of his writings and journals, blurring the distinction between a philosopher’s work and his autobiography. I loved this guy; I felt a kindred spirit in someone who lived 200 years ago who seemed as absolutely confounded by the world as I did.*

In turn I felt the need to read the other works Kierkegaard had read, Plato or Hegel or Goethe. And these were, as well, available at these new bookstores in shiny new editions. I would sit on the benches in the stores and thumb through them before I had to go to work. Borders would be the place I took my girlfriend on a Friday night (Yeah, I know.) I loved the books that were still being printed probably ‘pro bono’ by the publishers. I bought volumes of new criticism by current academics that were blatantly expensive, drowned in jargon, and sometimes insufferable to read. I became intrigued not by what was the current bestselling fiction, but by the ones the contemporary critics thought to be the most important. Pynchon, DeLillo, Gaddis. I was unconsciously subscribing to what Jonathan Franzen would later call ‘The Status model’ of reading. I loved reading blurbs by other authors or critics on the backs of books telling you how important or life-changing a book was, that The Gold-Bug Variations was the Most Important American Novel Since Gravity’s Rainbow. I just had to read that!

And some of them I actually did read. I read the other authors who were being touted at the same time as Pynchon and DeLillo (Updike or Roth) but it was these two that stuck with me the most at this time. I loved the way DeLillo wrote. I was utterly impressed by the architecture and apocalypse of Gravity’s Rainbow, but put off by it as well. It was a tough one to read on your own the first time. As I started to compile these books in my house, my friend told me of a professor who taught both DeLillo and Pynchon at the University of Cincinnati. Really? This did intrigue me enough to pursue going back to school (at least just for literature, for now). This professor was teaching Moby-Dick, Absalom, Absalom and Gravity’s Rainbow in a graduate seminar twice a week at 8 in the morning. “I don’t think he is going to have enough students to teach the course though,” my friend told me, “but maybe go and talk with him.” I did. I told him I never finished my Bachelor’s but I was really interested in Pynchon and DeLillo and other, even more contemporary authors like Richard Powers. He told me taught Powers as well. Knew him, in fact. He let me into the class. It was tough. I needed a guide through these books and he was it.

But as much as I did like this class, school was still school but the bookstore was a retreat, a comfort zone. And as much as I would like to believe it was a time of self-education, I can see that it was also a place to hide. But it was a place to discover. I loved those stores!

I write all this, of course, as these bookstores are fighting for their very existence. Borders has filed for bankruptcy, and closing more local stores, after closing the one I frequented some years ago. The large local chain Joseph-Beth (for which I did work for four years) has filed for Chapter 11. Will they emerge? I certainly hope so, although the outlook for Borders looks grim. But Barnes & Noble is suffering as well, for all to see, shuttering, in the last year, one of their flagship stores in Manhattan, that most literary of islands. But the particular impetus for this bit of autobiographic nostalgia on my part is Nicole Krauss’s article in the current The New Republic, “The End of Bookstores.” It’s a polemic that has been waiting in the cultural air like some defeated Platonic idea for someone to write it for the last couple months.

Taking as her starting-point the NY Times’ decision to increase the scope of its bestseller lists to include e-Books in separate lists, Krauss writes: “You had to read between the lines to find the real news, but there it was: To the growing list of things that will be extinct in our children's world, we can now add bookstores. Does it surprise us? Should we care?”

This is going to a ‘To Be Continued’ post, as it has already sprawled out of hand (and mind). To Ms. Krauss’s question of whether we should care, I would think it would be obvious I would answer in the affirmative. For me, and perhaps for others, in our overtly commercial society, bookstores have taken some of the cultural space that I think other earlier minds planned for museums and libraries. I hope to expand on this in the coming days.

*1990, actually

*At the time I was able to read Kierkegaard as he has been pigeon-holed; an ‘Existentialist’ and not a religious author. I no longer feel that way, but I did then.

A Topical Reminder From our Friend Fred

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 23:51:00 +0000

Work and boredom.
Looking for work in order to be paid: in civilized countries today almost all men are at one in doing that. For all of them work is a means and not an end in itself. Hence they are not very refined in their choice of work, if only it pays well. But there are, if only rarely, men who would rather perish than work without any pleasure in their work. They are choosy, hard to satisfy, and do not care for ample rewards, if the work itself is not the reward of rewards. Artists and contemplative men of all kinds belong to this rare breed, but so do even those men of leisure who spend their live hunting, traveling, or in love affairs and adventures. All of these desire work and misery if only it is associated with pleasure, and the hardest, most difficult work if necessary. Otherwise, their idleness is resolute, even if it spells impoverishment, dishonor, and danger to life and limb. They do not fear boredom as much as work without pleasure; they actually require a lot of boredom if their work is to succeed. For thinkers and all sensitive spirits, boredom is that disagreeable "windless calm" of the soul that precedes a happy voyage and cheerful winds. They have to bear it and must wait for its effect on them. Precisely this is what lesser natures cannot achieve by any means. To ward off boredom at any cost is vulgar, no less than work without pleasure. Perhaps Asians are distinguished above Europeans by a capacity for longer, deeper calm; even their opiates have a slow effect and require patience, as opposed to the disgusting suddenness of the European poison, alcohol.
- F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, reviewed by guest blogger Oscar Cat

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 01:08:00 +0000

When I got home tonight I found on the kitchen floor, right next to where Oscar's food bowl had been overturned (empty), a number of notebook pages on which was scrawled in an almost undecipherable hand (paw?) the text I have transcribed for you below. Like the caveats before the commentaries on DVDs, I cannot claim to endorse what he has written: The views expressed are his and his alone. (I did, however, fill his bowl.)

I don’t get out much. In fact, my time is spent almost entirely – excepting some brief escapes to the fire escape – indoors. During the times that my human is here, I can count on him for some company, maybe even a little playtime. But during the days when he disappears for 9 to 10 hours (he is indoor/outdoor), I am on my own. And you can only sleep and drink from the sink so much. After a while, it gets old. That is usually when I start to peruse the human’s library.
He has a number of books, and I have cracked more than a few. About two months ago a new one turned up amongst the stacks. A sunset-orange paperback with 'Freedom' emblazoned in white across a cover with a juicy picture of a plump little blue bird peeking from the margin. It caught my cat eye. ‘By the Author of The Corrections,’ it said. Oh yeah, that guy. Even the cat community caught tale of that one. Oprah = Hand That Feeds You. You don’t bite that. (We in the animal community have known that for a long time; you humans just put it in your words.) I never got a crack at The Corrections, and I may have been one of the few mammals on the planet that did not read it or at least venture an opinion without reading it, be it a purr or a demur. So here was this one in front of me, and, as you guys say, I was curious.
It started ok. It’s a family saga - Walter and Patty Berglund and their two kids Joey and Jessica, with the tag-a-long ex-college roommate/unrequited love/aging rock star Richard Katz - layered with overtones of social criticism. Very much like that last one apparently. A different human (or ‘characters’, as you humans call them when you make up fake humans) holds center narrative stage, then the book will shift to a different human and their point-of-view. One of the humans even writes their chapters of the book (although this human is not Mr. Franzen, it is one of the imaginary humans in the book, understand? A little confusing, I know. If you are a cat reading this, maybe this novel should not be your first ‘human’ book, both for this reason, and a reason I am going to get to in a paragraph or so). Some of it is entertaining and enlightening, Mr. Franzen can be a astute social critic, like when he describes America thus: "[I]t wasn't the people with socialble genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent; it was the people who didn't get along well with others." But, for all the insight, I never felt like Mr. Franzen really captured a full human. They did not seem, to me, to be fully-drawn, more a mere concurrence of neuroticisms, some stereotypes, and snappy dialogue. They tend to flesh out by the end of the 560 page novel, but you wonder whether this is what you bring to them after spending so long with them, rather than what Mr. Franzen gives you (although Mr. Franzen does give you this: they are all, literally, 'depressed'; they all each confess to it at differing points in the novel and most of them are taking the meds, the Zolofts and the Lexapros).
You spend a good deal of time with Patty Berglund at the beginning, then some time with Mr. Katz (I do like the name!), then some with their youngest son Joey (and this particular section went on a little long for this cat), then finally some with our passive non-aggressive patriarch Walter. (We never really get to know the daughter Jessica, who inhabits the fringes of these stories but never gets one of her own, and whom Mr. Franzen punishes even further with her late-novel career choice: literary agent in New York.) Walter really seemed a bit of a caricature of a human up to this point with his kooky ideas (that people should just stop having kids because the planet is overcrowded). So it was really good to finally get some in-depth narrative point-of-view time with old Walter. He becomes a lot more empathetic. You understand that as a human he can have a theory of not wanting people to reproduce, but also desperately want to father a child with his young assistant, Lalitha. There it is. The old human rub. Theory vs. Practice, Dream vs. Reality. I got it. And I was beginning to get him.
Until I got to this, on page 548 of a 562 page novel:
“Walter never liked cats. They’d seemed to him the sociopaths of the pet world, a species domesticated as an evil necessary for the control of rodents and subsequently fetishized the way unhappy countries fetishize their militaries, saluting the uniforms of killers as cat owners stroke their animals’ lovely fur and forgive their claws and fangs. He’d never seen anything in a cat’s face but simpering incuriosity and self-interest; you only had to tease one with a mouse-toy to see where its true heart lay.”
Whoa there, Mr. Berglund/Franzen! ‘Sociopaths of the pet world’? ‘Evil’? Really?
You know, my human has other books besides the 'fiction'; there is also quite a bit of the 'non-fiction' And I have dipped into these as well. Here, in fact, is an interesting quote I found in one of them:
"The Hydrogen bomb tested at Bikini [a very small island in the Pacific] was more than five hundred times more powerful than that dropped on Hiroshima...there had been total devastation for a radius of four miles..James Cameron, a British journalist who witnessed the explosion, noticed pigs running around the island. A scientist next to him commented: 'I feel like apologizing to those pigs. They belong to a reasonable and uncomplicated species, not without a certain grace. At least they aren't crazy.'" (Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century 1952-1999, pg. 58)
Hmm. So I know we eat a bird or two now and then, and maybe some that might be on your endangered species list, but let's keep it in perspective, please. Only one animal put themselves on the endangered species list. (Well, maybe two, if you count the Dodo bird, but they did not invent the H-bomb either.) But here we have Walter Berglund, going door-to-door asking families to keep us killer cats inside at all times due to our birding skills! Are we supposed to think he has gone overboard? I have read some of Mr. Franzen's essays, and I know he shares some of Walter's Avian-centric views! How come the birds get to be free*, but we don...
Oh, I get it.
Freedom. Who imposes it? Who has it? Any of us? You humans? How free are you really? Is Walter only a liberal because he rebelled against his father, Gene Berglund, who was a conservative? Does Joey only defect to Straussian Republican Judaism to rebel against his father Walter? Do you seek your union with your mate out of 'love', or - just as Walter seems to discover, despite his anti-population campaign - to procreate: to make more humans to make more humans. 'Socialble genes' (Gene Berglund) from the 'Old World'? Or selfish genes? What controls Walter? What controls you?
Sorry, had to hop for a second. There was something at the window, I thought it was a bird. What was I saying?
Oh yeah, these are heady questions, and while this book is certainly interested in them, I never found the human characters made me fully care about how they are affected by these questions. And I feel like Mr. Franzen wanted us to. I feel like he wanted a character-driven novel of ideas, and I never really felt for any of the characters, except maybe Mr. Katz. He was interesting, in a way...But don't let this little review put you off. You can certainly read the book and decide for yourself.
After all, unlike us animals, you have your free will.

*In fairness, I should note, in Mr. Franzen's defense, the testimony of a Mr. A. Bird: 'But their yoke isn't easy, in fact it's a drag'