way, way, way too long reading response

Alright, first off, not that I'm really familiar with Akashic aside from seeing the name once in a while pop up on books, so I guess I shouldn't have been surprised by the Girls Against Boys connection. Looking into that on allmusic.com and seeing their singer listed as "Scott McCloud" made me think, "Jesus, is everyone in this band moonlighting in books?" But a bit of googling quickly showed that Girls Against Boys' Scott McCloud is not the Scott McCloud of "Understanding Comics" fame. Anyway, I'm a nerd and I'm rambling. The only really revelent thing I wanted to throw in there was a quote from their allmusic bio; "their jump to major label Geffen, 1998's Freak*on*ica, was the worst record of their career." That statement just seems fitting in with Temple's comments and comparisons about his own experience with a "major" that totally didn't get it.

For me, reading the statement about how 175,000 new books were published in 2003 just made me curious what that number might have been in say, 1957. Or 1922? I mean, I know there was that whole WWI to WWII crowd of Stein and Hemingway and these others that sort of burst into the public eye (Pound, Joyce, Faulkner and later all the Beats). And a lot of these people really sorta had what today might be considered "rock star status." So what was that all about? Were there just less books being published? Was it a fluke? Was it something about the time (pre-tv domination, people needing escape and answers after the wars and finding it in literature)? Or was it the promotion techniques? I don't really know anything about what they would have been at that time. Nothing too radical, I'd guess. I think as far as the Beats would be concerned (who didn't really explode until the mid-60's, after most of them had been on the scene for several years) there would definately be a connection to the times and a whole (counter)culture of people finding something to identify with in their writings, pushing them into that rock star status (which was also something new and a force of its own as a concept at that time, so maybe there's a connection there too).

I don't know. I'm just tossing around ideas seeing if anyone else has thought about this. But it does seem like that rock stars of the literary world concept has pretty much died. Yeah there's the occasional Chuck Palahniuk. But that's one in how many? And even then, if you asked like your mom who Chuck Palahniuk is, would she know? Would she be able to name something he's written? And he publishes on the majors.

Anyway, I like Temple's comparison between the indie world of books and music. And both scenes seem to have come about out of necessity. You hear so much these last couple of years about how people had to break from the standards of their medium because those standards and practices had become broken and obsolete, yet these big companies just wanna beat a dead horse. The immediate and big publicity one coming to mind is Radiohead's on-line release of their last album. Or just the other day I read an interview with Joss Wedon (writer/creator Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Toy Story, lord of the fanboys), and he was talking about his new show and saying how he never plans to work in tv again when (he didn't even say "if") this fails because the people in charge of the networks just don't realize that their medium is failing--they don't allow the people creating their programming to be creative--to do their job. It seems the exact same thing is going on and has been going on in music and literature. So those forms went to indie publishing (Wedon sees one underdeveloped option for independent creation in the short form video on the web, which he's begun toying with beginning with a hugely succesful mini-series that in its first 3 weeks sold more than any downloadable tv show on itunes ever has).

So, going back to what I was talking about with things being a sign of the times, maybe there's something to that. This seems to be really been stewing over the last 30 years, with the new indies of different formats starting to actually have a wider impact in the last 20 (which isn't to say there hasn't been some form of a much smaller independent avenue for artists even earlier, but...). Music headed towards indies in the early '80's along with books with more succesful indie labels and publishers really coming to prominance in the early to mid '90's, many of which have continued to grow to this day (Matador, Merge, Temple's Akashic, McSweeney's, etc.). The same seemed to happen with movies in the same time period, things like "Slacker" and "Clerks" bringing them to a wider audience. Not becoming household names and not making their creators millionaires, just wider audiences than might have gotten in say 1980. Now it's starting with tv, just a little later. But then, it's a newer medium than the others.

Temple says "independents are often far more attentive to their books, and more creative with their marketing, even if their budgets are smaller." I'd say it's the same with any of these mediums. I'd actually guess it could be revised to say "BECAUSE their budgets are smaller." You have to be more creative. Plus there's more of a personal drive to succeed--it's your work and you have a sense of ownership over it. And even then, since there's no expectations of "making it huge," why not experiment, try something new, see what sticks? There's really not much to lose.

Temple says that only by embrasing the new realities of publishing "can literature hope to reclaim the magic it once exerted upon the public." Is that all there is to it? Or are some people in this era just done with books, or at least books that force you to be engaged with the text while reading? I mean, most people these days just don't want to bother to make the effort it takes to listen to good music and I doubt it's much different with books. And I know that might sound elitist and pretentious but, don't worry, I'm not gonna get started on payola and Clear Channel and the coming rapture. But I recognize that it is a time consuming and sometimes draining effort. And I know everyone taking this class is here because they have an interest in "other" "non-cookie-cutter" voices. But sometimes when we're blessed enough to spend most of our days immersed in an open and idea accepting climat like Columbia (or "art" school in general), it can be easy to forget that we are definately not most of the world. Most of the world likes Oprah to say "this is what we're reading next" or radio stations to say "this is what you like because you've listened to it four times in the last hour" or big Hollywood studios to manipulate stereotypes and say "girls like crying movies, boys like explosions." And, no, not everything on the radio is bad, or every Hollywood movie, and even Oprah has her moments. But by this point, with most people having only known any given form of art in this way for their entire lives, how many people out there really care that this is the scenario? How many people actually want something different? So there aren't the literary big shot, rock stars anymore. But maybe that's not that awful. I mean, I wouldn't wanna see Sonic Youth or Pavement at Lollapalooza anyway. I wanna see 'em in a tiny club. The same way I wanna be able to write authors to ask them questions for class presentations at their e-mail address for the college they teach at because they aren't rock stars and they don't live in mansions.