Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

"Heavy Rotation" on WNYC radio

2009-07-06T04:55:04-07:00

Shortly after 1:20pm EDT today (Monday), editor Peter Terzian and contributors Joshua Ferris and Martha Southgate will be talking about Heavy Rotation on WNYC's Leonard Lopate show, airing in New York City on 93.9 FM and AM 820 and streamable anywhere from the show's webpage. (Free download through I-Tunes available here, at least for a while.)

In other Heavy Rotation news, Liz Brown has blogged about the book at Kill Fee, and Peter has written a guest post at Large-hearted Boy about the role music has played in helping him mourn the loss of his mother.

Update, July 13: Newsday published a full-page preview of the book on July 11, and Publishers Weekly gave the book a starred review (scroll down) on July 6, writing that "these essays exhibit a perfect blend of respect and irreverence, with an intoxicating intimacy; readers who love music will devour this collection, and beg for a second volume."

My review of Matthew B. Crawford's "Shop Class as Soulcraft"

2009-07-02T14:47:42-07:00

"Nice Work If You Can Get It," my review of Matthew B. Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work , appears in this weekend's edition of The National (Abu Dhabi). For the record, I wrote this review well before the controversies of the past week.

Heavy Rotation in Bryant Park

2009-07-01T16:46:10-07:00

Some photos from New York's Bryant Park today, featuring John Jeremiah Sullivan on the guitar, Nick Laudadio on the drums, James Wood on the bongos, and readings by Peter Terzian, Asali Solomon, Cliff Chase, Stacey D'Erasmo, and Joshua Ferris—all in honor of the release of the music-memoir anthology Heavy Rotation.

Heavy Rotation, more reviews

2009-06-30T13:59:38-07:00

Some new reviews for Peter's Heavy Rotation:

At Bookforum's website, Nicole Lanctot writes that "it is difficult to put the book down without having been moved—or without jotting down a few albums to listen to."
And at Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Jason Diamond praises Mark Greif's and Ben Kunkel's contributions, among others, and writes that "each entry is an honest embrace of a connection to music."

Review of Alain de Botton's "Pleasures and Sorrows of Work"

2009-06-26T14:14:30-07:00

My review of Alain de Botton's Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is in the New York Times Book Review of 28 June 2009. I'm afraid I wasn't crazy about it. As it happens, though, I wrote favorably about de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life in a round-up of Proust news published in Lingua Franca almost exactly a decade ago.

Heavy Rotation, the early reviews

2009-06-22T10:10:27-07:00

Heavy Rotation, an anthology of writers' reflections on life-changing albums edited by Peter Terzian (aka my boyfriend), is getting some great reviews. The Village Voice published a full-page playlist/teaser on 15 June, in which Zach Baron confessed that it was "a relief to read music criticism that does not employ the word 'skronk.'" On June 19, in L Magazine, Mike Conklin called Ben Kunkel's contribution to the anthology "the definitive piece of writing about the Smiths." And today, June 22, the website Modern Tonic asserted that Heavy Rotation "will top the '25 Most Played' list on the iPod of your mind." See below for New York City events, which start with a reading at Cobble Hill's Book Court tomorrow night.

Update, September 24: La New-Yorkaise wrote about Colm Toibin's and Joshua Ferris's contributions on June 23, and today the New York Times blog Paper Cuts publishes a playlist by Peter of his favorite memory-flavored songs. A few hours later: And the New York Observer takes note of the book and of the Bryant Park lunchtime reading-concert (see below for details).

Update, September 25: In The Onion's A.V. Club, Michaelangelo Matos writes:

John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essay on American Primitive Vol. II is tremendous: a travelogue about going to interview John Fahey—whose label, Revenant, issued the compilation—that spins out into deeper assessments about the meanings of American song. Todd Pruzan writes a beautiful account of a longstanding friendship with a New Zealand woman set to the soundtrack of the NZ film Topless Women Talk About Their Lives. Lisa Dierbeck presents a tough account of a teen life lived in the mirror image—even before the album appeared—of the tough first Pretenders album. Asali Solomon’s sharp firsthand account of racism in the Dominican Republic is set to a Gloria Estefan record. And Pankaj Mishra’s ode to ABBA’s Super Trouper is a snapshot of a rapidly modernizing India in the early ’80s, when the tape Mishra picked up at a marketplace became a totem of a new world to be—and not just inside the album’s grooves.

And at her blog Light Reading, Jenny Davidson calls Ben Kunkel's essay "unmissably good" and calls John Jeremiah Sullivan's "absolutely and divinely sublime."

Heavy Rotation, the debut and the parties

2009-06-11T20:37:58-07:00

My boyfriend, Peter Terzian, has edited an anthology that Harper Perennial is going to publish on June 23: Heavy Rotation: Twenty Writers on the Albums that Changed Their Lives. It features the following pair-ups:

Stacey D'Erasmo on Kate Bush,
Pankaj Mishra on ABBA,
Colm Tóibín on Joni Mitchell,
Mark Greif on Fugazi,
Sheila Heti on the Annie soundtrack,
Ben Kunkel on the Smiths,
James Wood on the Who,
John Jeremiah Sullivan on early blues,
Clifford Chase on the B-52s,

and quite a few more. In my opinion, it is the book of the year. Kirkus, perhaps a more neutral judge, calls it "Music writing with a personal twist by an assortment of modern writers. . . . A satisfying, fun read that may prompt rifling through old CDs and LPs to reclaim one's own transformative musical memories." You can order your copy now on Amazon, on Barnes & Noble, or through Powells.

And if you're in New York City this summer, you're invited to some parties in its honor, which promise to be pretty amazing, especially if you have a taste for lounge-singing book editors and bongo-drumming literary critics. Here's the schedule, courtesy of Peter:

Tuesday, June 23rd, 7:00 pm
Heavy Rotation launch party
Come have a drink, meet the contributors, and celebrate the book's publication day.
At Book Court, 163 Court Street between Dean and Pacific Streets, Brooklyn
Wednesday, July 1st, 12:10 pm
A lunch-hour event in Bryant Park, behind the New York Public Library. Editor Peter Terzian will be discussing music and writing with contributors Clifford Chase, Stacey D'Erasmo, Joshua Ferris, and Asali Solomon. Plus, the New York debut of contributor John Jeremiah Sullivan's band Fayaway, with special guest percussionist James Wood.
Note: Fayaway will play two sets—one at 12:10, before the discussion, and another at 1:30, after the discussion. The discussion will begin at 12:30.
At Bryant Park Reading Room, New York (near 42nd Street, between the back of the library and 6th Avenue—look for the burgundy and white umbrellas)
Tuesday, July 14th, 7:00 pm
Contributors Lisa Dierbeck, John Haskell, Todd Pruzan, and Martha Southgate will join me in a reading and panel discussion. With musical accompaniment by cabaret singer (and the book's Harper Perennial editor) Rakesh Satyal.
At McNally Jackson, 52 Prince Street between Lafayette and Mulberry Streets, New York

No RSVP required. See you there!

The Wreck surveyed

2009-06-10T10:28:35-07:00

Over at Conversational Reading, Levi Stahl has been kind enough to write of The Wreck of the Henry Clay that "this attractively chunky, almost pocket-sized collection works surprisingly well as a book." Stahl's is the second notice the Wreck has received (the first was from Chris Shea at Brainiac, registering the fact that my blog now came in a "meatspace edition"), which is two more than I was expecting. It is of course not too late to buy a copy (click here!). It now costs just $14.95 in ink-and-paper, and during the month of July, you can get it for 10 percent less than that if you enter the code "JULYCONTEST10" when you check out.

Update, June 22: Magic Molly added some nice words on June 16, as did Jeremy Hatch at The Rumpus on June 11.

Further update, June 24: The New Yorker's blog Book Bench interviews me about the dark secrets behind the production of the news-making Wreck of the Henry Clay.

Still later update, June 28: Duck Beater wrote on June 22 that he's buying a copy, and it may be the only book he buys all summer.

Even later, July 8: Peter Mendelsund writes at Jacket Mechanical that the Wreck is "one of the most entertaining and informative books I’ve read all year."

Advertisement for myself

2009-05-15T08:13:40-07:00

Caleb Crain

The Wreck of the Henry Clay

2009-05-14T12:58:16-07:00

With all the time and energy you've squandered on that blog, you could have written a book. So goes the self-reproach, and indeed, the book in question turns out to be 449 pages long. And you can get it now for just $14.95! (And until July 31, get 10% more off if you enter the code "JULYCONTEST10" at checkout.) And/or download it as a PDF for just $5! Seriously. I designed it myself, and I'm afraid it looks it. But it has pictures! And six years of essays, which many of you will already have read, about dogs, torture, etymology, American history, gay marriage, political rhetoric, movies, tree climbing, indie rock, Mars, peak oil, anarchism, and literary criticism. As I explain in a foreword (not available in stores!), I included the "longer and more essayistic" posts, "the ones that I thought it might be pleasant to read while unattached from the Internet." (I left out posts that were little more than references to other things online, and also the "Notebook" posts, which supplement essays of mine published elsewhere, because I think they belong with those essays, when/if they're ever reprinted.)

All of the posts and essays included in The Wreck of the Henry Clay are available free already on this blog, so why should you buy it? I have no idea! I have given up trying to understand the internet's economics, but maybe it'll be like buying ringtones versus stealing MP3s? Who knows. It took a surprising amount of time to turn several hundred blog posts into a several-hundred-page book, so perhaps some of you will be willing to pay me for my PDF-creating skills? As I said, no idea. Let's not call this "self-published," by the way. That has a kind of disreputable sound. It's a chapbook, all right? Why am I doing this? I saw not long ago that someone had published a book of his Twitters, and I felt I was in danger of being behindhand. I am hereby restored to the bleeding edge. Also, now, when the electromagnetic-pulse device is detonated, I will be the only blogger in America with backup. And of course I'm looking forward to kicking back while the cold, hard internet cash at last streams in.

Objection, your honor

2009-04-08T16:48:46-07:00

Because the community of authors seem to be greeting the advent of the Google Books Settlement with uncharacteristic silence, here's the letter of objection I recently sent to the clerk of the court settling the case. You can only object if you opt in to the settlement, so this means I'm in. (The deadline for opting out or for objecting to the settlement is May 5.) The letter incorporates ideas that I laid out in earlier posts; apologies for the repetition. I'm sure I've mangled a few legal details along the way; the only thing I'm confident of is that the settlement will have important effects that have not been foreseen by anyone, let alone me.

Brooklyn, NY 11215
28 March 2009
Office of the Clerk, J. Michael McMahon
U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York
500 Pearl Street
New York, New York 10007
Dear Mr. McMahon:
As an author whose works appear in the Google Book Search database, I am writing to object to some of the provisions in the proposed Google Books Settlement. The concerns that motivate my objections came to me as I was navigating the settlement website, and broadly speaking, my objections fall into two categories. The first consists of defects in the settlement that seem to be caused by a mismatch between legal thinking, which is abstract and precise, and the diffuse and sometimes sloppy way that information is actually managed online. I've grouped these objections below under the heading "Practical objections." The second category is caused by the disparity between author's rights as legally defined and the influence and persuasive power practically available to authors heretofore. I’ve grouped these under the heading "Moral rights." There's some overlap between the two categories.
A. Practical objections.
1. I object to the restriction of the settlement to books registered with the U.S. Copyright Office.
According to the Google Books Settlement list of Frequently Asked Questions, “The requirement that United States works must be registered with the U.S. Copyright Office in order to be covered by the Settlement was included in the Settlement in order to comply with a decision of a U.S. court.” Perhaps, then, it’s a provision that the two parties felt they needed to comply with, but that your court will be able to set aside. I hope so. Until this settlement was proposed, it was unnecessary to register one's work with the U.S. Copyright Office in order to own copyright in it. If a copyright was infringed, an author could sue provided he was able to prove that the work in question was his and that he had not sold the rights to it. As a preliminary to a suit, an author did have to file a copyright claim with the Copyright Office, but it was not necessary to file this claim upon publication or for unpublished works in order to deter infringement. If approved, therefore, this settlement would have the practical effect of retroactively adding a bureaucratic requirement in order to secure ownership of copyright.
A personal example might explain the dilemma. Searching the Google Books database, I found a citation of a thesis I wrote as an undergraduate and deposited, as a requirement for my degree, in my college library. I never registered my thesis with the U.S. Copyright Office, because I never expected it to be published. Nonetheless I believed I had copyright in it and would have the power to decide whether it was to be published. As far as I can tell, Google has not yet digitized it, but by the terms of this settlement, the company is only restrained from digitizing it by its wish to maintain good will in the marketplace. By a common-sense definition, my undergraduate thesis is a "book"—it is bound, there are multiple copies (though only two, I’m pretty sure, in all the world), and it is publicly available (to anyone willing to trek to my college library).
Legal precedent would require me to register my undergraduate thesis with the Copyright Office in order to protect it. But I would argue that the sheer volume of Google's proposed encroachments ought to shift such a bureaucratic burden away from authors and onto Google. In other words, I believe that as a practical matter the courts should waive the formal requirement of copyright registration and offer the protections in the settlement to any book that Google finds on a library shelf.
2. I object to the lack of guidance in the instructions on the settlement website as to how authors should claim a book or an insert that appears several times in Google’s database.
By digitizing the holdings of many libraries, Google has inadvertently scanned a number of works several times. Sometimes the Google database treats the multiple digitizations as belonging to the same underlying work; sometimes it doesn’t. (It almost never knows when an insert has been reprinted.) Should an author claim every version of his work, so as to be sure that he protects his rights in every instance? Or should he only claim one version of each work, so as to avoid seeming to ask for settlement payments he doesn't deserve? As it stands, there is no way for an author to inform Google that it has digitized multiple copies of one work and that the author wants to make a single claim covering all such copies.
This is not merely a bureaucratic flaw. Under some of the ways that Google proposes to make money off of digitized books, different digital versions of a work would correspond to different revenue streams. If I were to get a share of the revenue only from one of several digitized versions of my work, I would be short-changed. I think this is a problem that could be easily remedied if Google were to modify its online claim form.
3. I object to the failure to share future revenue streams with the authors of inserts.
Google has offered to make one-time cash payments to authors of books and inserts for the infringements of copyright it has made by digitizing works and for the right to sell digitizations of their works to institutional subscribers. However, it also proposes to make money off of these digitizations in other ways—perhaps by placing advertisements next to search results or by selling downloads of digitized books. Google proposes to share these alternative revenues with the authors of whole books, but according to schedule C of the settlement agreement, it is not planning to share these profits with the authors of inserts. I object to this as grossly unfair. Why should the author of a novel be entitled to a class of compensation that an author of short stories is denied? In the case of an anthology, a book consists entirely of inserts, and Google would apparently be entitled to keep for itself all such revenues.
Though this seems to me a matter of simple fairness, I have classed it as a practical matter because I think it's the sort of problem whose resolution looks cumbersome to a legal mind but that would in practice be quite easy to remedy with a modification of the database procedures.
4. I object to the failure of the agreement to cover periodicals.
Again this seems to me a matter of simple fairness, but I'm classing it as a practical objection because it seems to me that the distinction between a book and a magazine is much more perspicuous to a lawyer than it is to the scanners in operation at Google. As a practical matter, the Google Books Database does not often distinguish between periodicals and books, especially with older periodicals that are no longer publishing. As researchers who use the Google Books database know to their dismay, periodicals are the database’s Achilles heel; in many cases, older volumes of a bound periodical are treated as if they were a series of books with the same title, and volume numbers and year of publication are rarely included in the metadata.
But my concern here is not as a researcher but as an author to maintain his rights. I have written much more for magazines than for books, and over a much longer period of time, and Google seems to have digitized a number of these works, sometimes for magazines that are defunct and no longer around for Google to negotiate with. I feel that I ought to be able to assert control over and be compensated for Google’s use of all these writings, and if they are excluded from the settlement, it will be an opportunity missed.
B. Moral rights
The idea of moral rights is an attempt to address the fact that works of art are not like, say, eggs or lumps of coal. The creator of a work of art cares about what happens to it, even after he's sold the right to publish it or display it or even own it, in a way that a keeper of chickens does not care about the fate of eggs, or a miner about the fate of coal. Unlike monetary rights, the moral rights in a work of art cannot be transferred. I understand that American law does not protect authors' moral rights. However, in the community of American publishing, these rights have nonetheless been to some extent respected, because a publisher who fails to respect them is considered scurrilous and loses the good will of the community of authors.
Google has introduced itself into the publishing world in a new way. Unlike other publishers, it is not in the business of signing up new authors but is exclusively in the business of repackaging works that have been published by others. It is therefore less subject to direct moral suasion by authors, and this settlement may be one of the few occasions when authors have the power to exercise their moral force with Google. I believe it would be appropriate for authors to insist that Google recognize explicitly some of authors’ moral rights.
1. I object to the failure of the settlement to allow an author to restrict display and redistribution of creative work even if he signed a "work-for-hire" contract with his original publisher.
In the case of a poem, a work of fiction, or a memoir, I believe that an author retains effective control over republication of a work, even if he originally signed a work-for-hire contract.
Again, a personal example may clarify the issues. A decade ago, a short story of mine was published in an anthology now out of print. I'm happy it's out of print, and I'd like to keep it that way, but when I searched for my name in the Google Books database, a "snippet view" of the story popped up and panicked me. I could not remember whether I had signed a work-for-hire contract for it. After subsequent research, I discovered that I had not signed a work-for-hire contract and that I do retain all legal control over the copyright. But what if I had signed one? Would I really have no control over my short story? Before the advent of Google Books, a traditional publisher might have been able to buy the legal right to reprint my story but I doubt that very many publishers would dare republish it over my objections. If any tried to, I would call foul, alerting my friends in the community of authors and asking my agent to apply pressure. Please note that I'm not claiming that I could win money for a reprinting even if I'd signed a work-for-hire contract. I'm claiming that over creative work, I retain an effective veto over republication, especially if the work has subsequently fallen out of print, no matter what kind of contract I originally signed. I believe the settlement should make some kind of provision for a veto based on moral rights, to respect an author's wish to decide which of his works he would like to be judged by in the future.
A side matter: On the settlement website as it is operational today, 28 March 2009, when an author views the details of an insert that he has claimed, the "Display Uses Authorized" button stays clicked when he saves his changes, but the "Display Uses Not Authorized" button does not. The anomaly needs to be fixed.
2. I object to the failure of the settlement to treat the creator of a "work-for-hire" as the copyright holder when the purchaser of the work-for-hire is defunct and no subsequent owner of the rights comes forward.
Publishers go out of business, and sometimes they take their rights with them. The Google Books Settlement exists to remedy exactly this problem. I believe that if a publisher doesn't sell his copyrights before expiring, the rights effectively revert to the creator, even if that creator signed a work-for-hire contract. This may be more a matter of jeopardy than of strict accounting. In other words, if a traditional publisher were to try to republish such a work without compensating the original creator, he'd be risking a lawsuit. The Google Books Settlement, however, excludes books written as works-for-hire and therefore does not make Google accountable to such creators. As a practical matter, such books will probably be treated by Google as if they were non-work-for-hire books whose rights holders had not come forward.
My personal concern here is with translation. Most of my translation work was done as work-for-hire, and in at least one case, the publisher is now extinct. Who now owns the rights to those translations? I’d argue that I have a stronger claim on them than Google does. (Of course, if it transpires that the publisher before closing shop donated the rights elsewhere, then the donee has a stronger claim than either of us.) I suggest that Google modify its claim form to allow translators and other work-for-hire creators to state the nature of their contribution in a work and that Google compensate them (though perhaps not at the same rate as full-on authors) if no other claimants come forward.
I hope these objections are useful to you in deciding a final settlement, and I appreciate your attention to them.
Respectfully submitted,
Caleb Crain

The joy of sharing

2009-03-27T20:02:11-07:00

"Brother, Can You Spare a Room," my essay about Thomas Butler Gunn's 1857 book The Physiology of New York Boarding-Houses, appears in the 29 March 2009 issue of the New York Times Book Review. There's also a blog post about it on Paper Cuts. In buying the book itself, you have the option of the Cornell University Library facsimile, which has all the illustrations (browsable online here), or the Rutgers University Press reprint, which has an introduction, explanatory end notes, and a sample of the illustrations. The woodcuts featured with my essay in the Times illustrate (1) the joy of sharing a bed with people who lie "on their backs, with their knees making a pyramid of the bed-clothes . . . [and] moan all night like broken-hearted ring-doves," (2) German boarders, and (3) the Landlady Who Drinks.