Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon

Mark McGurl writes in this 2021 book:

* all fiction is genre fiction in that it caters to a generic desire.

* With its by – all – accounts absolute requirement of a happy ending for it to even receive recognition as a member of the genre by its devotees, the romance’s unforgivable sin is that it flagrantly satisfies the “imaginative needs of the community”… What other genres do indirectly, or even “critically,” it does shamelessly in the open and in resourcefully new ways.

From Pamela to the present, the novel in the English – speaking world has developed alongside and within a capitalist economy increasingly oriented toward consumer enjoyment and, if only implicitly, has been telling the story of that economy the whole time. What we now label the “romance” novel is the reflexive expression of the novel’s original appeal: not only is it written for the satisfaction of the imaginative needs of the reader, but it is about that satisfaction in the figure of the heroine and her mate, who always get what they want, and who in getting what they want reassure their readers of the legitimacy and continuity of the social order.

* Entering through the eyes as a succession of words, the novel is transformed into a series of affectively charged mental images of people and places.

* It would be for Norman Holland, whose classic Dynamics of Literary Response (1968) argues that the better part of what we do when we read is to activate emotional resonances between the text and our unacknowledged fantasies of return to pre – oedipal pleasures.

In his view, the conferral of interpretive meaning on the literary text is a form of defense against the unruliness and unspeakability of those pleasures, which are nonetheless the text’s primary raison d’être and source of generic appeal. In this sense, and never more so than when it is utterly obscene “adult entertainment,” all literature is children’s literature at its core.

* In the mostly unconscious act of introjection, which converts words into psychic events, the reader finds (or feels) analogies between the text’s fantasy material and their own. I have added an additional “basement” level, representing something like the Lacanian or Lovecraftian Real — that is, the substratum of utter indifference to human well – being from which literary and all other forms of fantasizing are obsessively repeated attempts to recover. The literary text is in this sense a therapeutic processing of that indifference as a pleasurable sensation of narrative meaning, and each distinct genre a quasi – algorithmic form of doing so.

Posted in Amazon | Comments Off on Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon

The Rise of Writing: Redefining Mass Literacy

Deborah Brandt writes in her 2014 book:

* Writing has always been used for work, production, output, earning, profit, publicity, practicality, record-keeping, buying, and selling. Increasingly, writing itself is the product that is bought and sold, as it embodies knowledge, information, invention, service, social relations, news – that is, the products of the new economy. At the turn of the twentieth century, knowledge workers represented 10 percent of all employees. By 1959 this proportion had increased to more than 30 percent of the workforce, and by 1970 it was 50 percent. In 2000, knowledge workers were estimated to account for 75 percent of the employed population, with the biggest gains found among highly educated professional
and technical workers in government and service-producing industries (Wyatt and Hecker 2006). If, as Thomas Stewart (1998) asserts, “Knowledge has become the primary ingredient in what we make, do, buy, and sell” (p. 12), then writing has become a dominant form of labor as it transforms knowledge and news into useable, shareable form.

* The status of writing as a dominant form of labor in the US economy puts an unusual degree of pressure on people’s scribal skills, as their writing literacy is pulled deeply into manufacturing, processing, mining, and distributing information and knowledge. Writing is a time-intensive form of labor that tends to follow people home.

* So rapacious are the production pressures on writing, in fact, that they are redefining reading, as people increasingly read from the posture of the writer, from inside acts of writing, as they respond to others, research, edit, or review other people’s writing or search for styles or approaches to borrow and use in their own writing. Reading is being subordinated to the needs of writing…

* the idea that a text belongs to the person who writes it is not the only concept of authorship that can be found in current US copyright law. When it comes to writing undertaken within the scope of employment – in other words, the writing done by most people in society – copyright turns inside out: under a provision called “Work Made for Hire,” the law is careful to sever writers from ownership claims over the texts that they write at work.

* In the eyes of the law, the employer is the author of their texts. As individuals, workplace writers are not allowed to profit individually from the writing they do. Even the knowledge they may produce in their heads as a result of the writing they do at work is technically not theirs to benefit from. Further, workaday writers are not legally entitled to express their own views through their workplace writing. They can be fired for doing it, and they won’t get much support from the courts if they appeal. According to the Supreme Court, people do not really write at work as citizens or free beings but rather as willingly enlisted corporate voices. At least in their official capacities, workaday writers don’t write as themselves at work, according to the Court. They are not individually responsible for what they are paid to say. Consequently, they don’t really mean what they say. In fact, according to the Court, people who write for pay can’t really mean what they say. Their speech rights are corrupted and, hence, inoperable. From this perspective, writing starts to look a lot less romantic and a lot more feudal.

* copyright is reserved for texts that are considered creative or artistic, or that otherwise promote learning, or have some other enduring social utility…

* teachers and academics still enjoy this privileged exemption and, by dint of long-standing tradition, retain rights to their own writing and other intellectual property even when done on an employer’s premises.

* Constitutional scholar C. Edwin Baker (1989) has written most compellingly of what happens to a citizen’s voice once it is put into paid service – when it becomes (someone else’s) rented property. Such coerced speech necessarily loses its free-speech protections because it is no longer self-directed: “Once a person is employed to say what she does, the speech usually represents not her own self-expression but, at best, the expression of the employer” (p. 54 ). Baker elaborates:

“The First Amendment protects a person’s use of speech to order and create the world in a desired way and as a tool for understanding and communicating about the world in ways
he or she finds important. These uses are fundamental aspects of individual liberty and choice. However, in our present historical setting, commercial speech reflects market
forces that require enterprises to be profit-oriented. This forced profit orientation is not a manifestation of individual freedom or choice. Unlike the broad categories of protected speech, commercial speech does not represent an attempt to create or affect the world in a way that has any logical or intrinsic connection to anyone’s substantive values or personal wishes.”

* speech made pursuant to official duties receives no First Amendment protection. Like private employers, government may control its employees’ speech in order to protect and promulgate its own interests.

* workaday writers are legally severed – economically, ethically, and politically – from the words they write on the job.

* writing – particularly literary writing but not exclusively so – enjoys its own prestige. Through the sometimes convoluted history of literacy in this culture and the ideologies it produces, writing is associated with creativity, talent, intellect, sensibility, knowledge – in a word, authority. In general, writing is a desirable skill, a somewhat scarce skill, respected for its difficulty and the achievement it represents, particularly when it results in publication. Writing benefits most of all from the cultural prestige of reading. Because many forms of reading over time have been marked with high cultural value, this value has come to extend to those who can write in those forms. In this climate, then, writing may bequeath its high status to an individual who engages in it. One can “make a name” through writing. Writing is also its own verifiable record of a powerful engagement with literacy and all of its goodness – including the human growth that is presumed to be entailed in an artistic or intellectual experience. This achievement of the writing per se certifies the writer and warrants the reading. Writing, then, can be an independent source of social value and power and, with some exceptions, it enhances the stature of anyone who claims authorship.

* Legal ghostwriting also collides with the custom of the court to be lenient with self-represented litigants.

* the Internet seems to be favoring a less original form of writing: creation by citation, sampling, cutting and pasting, the blurring of the roles of writers and readers.

* writing is wrapped in yearning and sometimes titanic ambition, tantamount to chasing a dream…

* Just as these young people were well aware of the high prestige afforded the successful artist or published author, they were also well aware of the precariousness of the occupation and the difficulty or unlikelihood of making a viable living as an independent writer…

* a writing orientation can create wariness toward reading, particularly toward its association with passivity and conformity.

* Another predicament of authorship… had to do with managing relations between one’s life and one’s work. …authorship could bring a heightened sense of confusion
and vulnerability, especially in the vicinity of friends and family. …misattribution, parody, estrangement, charges of libel, self exposure, the need for a pseudonym – these are all uncomfortable experiences that can attach to people who write yet rarely enter writing instruction as a focus for exploration and learning.

* reading is largely an internalizing process… writing per se is action in the world. It is an externalizing experience, and so its effects, as we have seen, can come back at writers from the outside. Thoughts can stay private during reading, but they are relentlessly externalized during writing. …bring more wear and tear, more trouble, more risk. Writing risks social exposure, political retaliation, legal blame.

* in the twenty-first century, citizens are more likely to run afoul of the courts not because they are able to read too little but because they choose to write too much. Prosecutors and defense attorneys scour the online writing of prospective jurors, including blogs, Facebook entries, and tweets, to look for predispositions and biases. Several criminal convictions have been overturned in recent years after jurors were discovered writing online about their jury experiences (Grow 2010). Freewheeling personal expression associated with social media is in friction with the court’s traditional ways of protecting the rights of defendants by controlling the speech of jurors.

Posted in America | Comments Off on The Rise of Writing: Redefining Mass Literacy

Invasion is a structure not an event (8-16-24)

Adam Kirsch writes in the WSJ:

The most frequently quoted sentence in the literature of settler colonialism is from the Australian scholar Patrick Wolfe: “Invasion is a structure, not an event.” Wolfe was referring specifically to the British settlement of Australia, but the principle applies equally to the United States and Canada, which were also created by dispossessing the peoples living there when Europeans arrived. That fact is hardly unknown—everyone who grows up in these countries learns about it in elementary school.

What is new in Wolfe’s formula is the idea that this original injustice is being renewed at every moment through various forms of oppression, some obvious, others invisible. The violence involved in a nation’s founding continues to define every aspect of its life, even after centuries—its economic arrangements, environmental practices, gender relations. Because settlement is not a past event but a present structure, every inhabitant of a settler colonial society who is not descended from the original indigenous population is, and always will be, a settler, rather than a legitimate inhabitant.

For the academic discipline of settler colonial studies, the goal of learning about settler colonialism in America and elsewhere is not simply to understand it, as a historian would, but to dismantle it. That process is known as decolonization, and the increasing currency of this term is an index of the rising influence of what might seem a merely academic idea. The command to “decolonize” has become almost faddish; guides have been written on how to decolonize your diet, your bookshelf, your backyard, your corporate board, and much more.

Posted in Australia | Comments Off on Invasion is a structure not an event (8-16-24)

Inculcating An Attitude Of Gratitude & Reverence For The USA (8-15-24)

06:30 The Real Reason for the Rise in Rape – and Why Feminists Won’t Mention It., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unmz-nuSS_I
11:30 Swoooon! Why is Harris Media Coverage Like This? | Mark Halperin, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0xCB1J0SOk
31:25 95% of journos badly want Trump to lose
33:20 WP: Why the disinformation brigade has utterly failed to weaken Trump, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/08/15/trump-fact-checking-truth-falsehood/
37:00 The Feminisation of Academia – Amy Wax, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhMGU-rExbE
40:00 You want a safe space? Build a family, make friends, join a strongly identifying in-group and hang out there
44:00 My last place finish in a 1984 triathlon, NBC: Last-place (female) finisher in Olympic marathon delivers a first-class Olympic moment | Paris Olympics
54:30 Andrew Schulz – INFAMOUS (2022), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCZkp023MdY
53:00 January 6 comedy
54:00 Andrew Schulz misses Trump as president
1:04:00 Kip joins to praise Louise Perry, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Perry
1:05:45 Animal rescue
1:08:00 At what age should men stop having kids?
1:15:00 It’s not good to fool mother nature
1:19:00 Amy Wax says women experience unwanted sex as dysphoric
1:21:00 WSJ: For Years, an Esteemed Law Professor Seduced Students. Was He Too Important to Fire?, https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/joshua-wright-student-relationships-c6377572
1:24:00 Amy Wax: Inculcating An Attitude Of Gratitude & Reverence For The USA
Exposing Channel 7’s secrets | Four Corners, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2y5VbC4WCo
Guardian: ‘I’m not sure Israel is a democratic state any more’: Yair Golan’s mission to save his country, https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/12/im-not-sure-israel-is-a-democratic-state-any-more-yair-golans-mission-to-save-his-country?CMP=oth_b-aplnews_d-1
Guardian: As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel, https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/13/israel-gaza-historian-omer-bartov?CMP=oth_b-aplnews_d-1
Did women in academia cause wokeness?, https://www.noahsnewsletter.com/p/did-women-in-academia-cause-wokeness?r=7bj1z
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/history-of-ugly-laws-america-disability

Posted in America, Feminism, Journalism | Comments Off on Inculcating An Attitude Of Gratitude & Reverence For The USA (8-15-24)

WEHT To Matt Drudge? (8-14-24)

01:00 NYT: Monkeypox and the Gay Community, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/24/briefing/monkeypox-gay-community.html
08:00 WEHT to Matt Drudge?
12:20 What Tucker Carlson did to get blacklisted by Matt Drudge, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/finding-matt-drudge/id1726181351
18:00 Why Drudge turned against Trump, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-drudge-turned-on-trump/id1726181351?i=1000647362894
30:00 Elites vs regular Americans, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7tJPnS8vJE
32:00 We don’t live in a media-run state contra to NS Lyons, https://substack.com/@theupheaval/note/c-65320115
37:30 Climate change
46:00 Did women in academia cause wokeness?, https://www.noahsnewsletter.com/p/did-women-in-academia-cause-wokeness?r=7bj1z
1:00:30 Exposing Channel 7’s secrets | Four Corners, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2y5VbC4WCo
1:05:00 The history of ugly laws,
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/history-of-ugly-laws-america-disability

Transcript.

Podnotes summary: The World Health Organization has raised concerns about a monkeypox epidemic. While the disease itself is concerning, there’s something even worse: stigma. Stigma around behaviors that transmit monkeypox, like certain sexual activities among gay men, can be more harmful than the disease by perpetuating discrimination.

Monkeypox primarily affects sexually active men in the LGBTQ+ community but isn’t exclusive to them; it’s not a “gay disease.” It spreads through close contact and while it disproportionately impacts gay men engaging in frequent sexual encounters, stigmatizing this behavior could hinder efforts to combat the virus.

HIV-positive chefs in Toronto held an event to fight against stigma associated with infectious diseases. Randy Davis believes education is key to alleviating fear and ignorance which fuel such stigmas.

Stigmatization doesn’t just affect those who are reckless; during the AIDS crisis, innocent people suffered due to a few individuals’ actions. This shouldn’t be repeated with monkeypox—we must follow science instead of falling into discriminatory traps.

Misinformation online has led doctors to correct homophobic narratives surrounding monkeypox transmission—it’s not limited by sexuality or behavior alone.

The story shifts focus onto Matt Drudge of Drudge Report fame—a once-conservative figure who turned against Donald Trump for reasons unknown—showing how quickly allies can become adversaries based on personal biases or changing political winds. Former associates describe Drudge as sensitive and unpredictable—a drama queen prone to cutting ties over minor slights.

In politics and media alike, relationships are often fragile; alliances built one day may crumble the next as interests diverge—much like nations might betray their own spies for broader strategic gains—as suggested by reports of U.S.-Iranian dealings regarding Israeli agents involved in assassinations. These complex dynamics underscore human fallibility and shifting priorities rather than inherent malice or betrayal.

Ultimately, understanding why figures like Drudge pivot politically remains speculative at best—with various insiders offering theories from policy disagreements to personal dislikes—but what’s clear is that attention-seeking individuals will always seek relevance amidst changing landscapes.

To dodge monkeypox, simply avoid certain gatherings such as gay piss orgies.

Charlie Kirk tweeted about monkeypox being a lesser concern compared to other issues. The Jerusalem Post reported on Tehran’s assassination list linked to Iran targeting Assad agents. Car insurance has spiked by 55% during the Harris-Biden administration due to less law enforcement leading to more reckless driving and higher insurance claims.

A young girl is forced into marriage with an older Muslim man, raising questions about cultural integration versus diversity needs. This practice, along with slavery, persists in modern Islam, reflecting underdevelopment and brutality in some parts of the Arab-Islamic world.

The term “fascism” lacks a clear definition; it varied across regions as a counter-response to communism without a central doctrine or headquarters. After research, one way to prevent monkeypox seems avoiding specific events.

A fabricated story accused Israeli soldiers of raping Palestinians but was debunked after medical exams showed no evidence of assault—just an attempt at smuggling contraband via concealment.

Scott Rasmussen discussed polling differences between elites (those earning over $150k/year with postgraduate degrees living in dense areas) and average Americans regarding trust in government and individual freedom—the elite often favor more control than what public policy reflects.

Many elites believe most Americans share their views even when they don’t align with public sentiment—a disconnect influencing political toxicity and voter disenchantment within America’s polarized society.

Polls show close elections can lead to legitimacy disputes among voters who distrust results not aligned with their beliefs—with both sides having history disputing election outcomes.

As for polls’ accuracy during elections: while skepticism exists due to changes like those seen during COVID-19-related voting adjustments, overwhelming evidence suggests presidential vote counts are generally reliable despite right-wing media casting doubts through selective reporting.

An attorney for Detroit explained that the windows were partially covered during voting to protect voter privacy. Official observers and hundreds of party challengers were present, alongside dozens of reporters. Despite objections to the 2020 count’s legitimacy, analyses debunking these claims are more convincing; no reputable lawyer would support Trump’s rigged election claims due to facts like a suburban shift towards Biden.

Noah Carl suggests academia’s leftward shift is influenced by an influx of women who tend to be less supportive of free speech and more in favor of censorship—often seen as protective but potentially contributing to a culture less open to controversial discourse.

ABC Australia documentary Four Corners reports: Channel 7 faced allegations ranging from using sex workers and drugs for interviews, workplace bullying, discrimination, and harassment. Many employees signed NDAs upon leaving or being fired under various circumstances such as maternity leave or after filing complaints about their treatment at work. These agreements often silence them from discussing their experiences publicly.

The text also mentions how certain jobs can be tough on everyone but claims there’s an expectation that men will endure silently while women might not tolerate such conditions well. It discusses the impact this has on industries like journalism where competition is fierce and economic stability is waning.

Employers often hesitate to hire women who might become pregnant or people from groups they perceive as less desirable workers, prioritizing their interests. Similarly, employees aim to maximize earnings while minimizing effort, and employers seek the most work for the least pay. We’re conducting a Zoom interview with a woman who risks speaking out even anonymously about management’s tactics.

At Channel 7, she was told to sift through staff emails that could be used against them. Asked how she felt about this task, she now feels sick; it reflects a broader issue where many have had to do distasteful things at work. The idea is that employment equates to choosing your “slave owner”—a harsh view of reality.

She criticizes the abuse of internal policies meant for ethical purposes but notes self-interest is common among all people—men and women, employers and employees. Everyone can claim victimhood; surrounding individuals may feel wronged by those same complaining parties. Life involves inadvertently harming others while pursuing one’s goals.

Elliot Blatt urges us to recognize these realities—wake up and smell the eucalyptus.

Posted in America, Australia, Feminism, Journalism | Comments Off on WEHT To Matt Drudge? (8-14-24)