Archive for the 'Gripes' Category

I keep waiting for the smart home. It’s pretty moot to me since my home looks pretty brill. Do we really want smart homes — homes that do everything for us automatically? I had a lot of PR material sent to me about smart AND dumb homes while compiling “2011” and have thus decided we’d be in trouble if the smart home invaded. And, in the words of Mad Magazine’s dearly departed founder —WHAT IF, you know…?

• Your “Smart Home” crashes and won’t let you in?
• Your toaster can’t find the software to toast your bread?
• You can’t multitask in your home- because if you use the washer, dryer, TVs, hair dryers, computers, printer, fax at the same time-because your house will slow down or freeze and have to be constantly rebooted?
• You haven’t upgraded your home to Windows Latest Crap and so the home can’t open up any of your windows? Wouldn’t that suck!
• Your home has to do time for “performing an illegal operation” and thanks to these occurring you constantly have no place to live?
• Your washing machine loses more than stray socks since you didn’t press the SAVE function?
• Your kid didn’t do as well on the college boards as your “Smart Home,” and your home got into a better college?
• Your “Smart Home” lost all of its smart data and became silly since you didn’t backup?
• You have to take courses every time your home has to be upgraded –formerly remodeled or repaired – if you didn’t upgrade, you can’t get replacement parts for your home or appliances?
• Your voice activated smart-pants home understands your “Honey, I’m home” command as “Honey, I’m a burglar,” and phones the cops cause it doesn’t believe you’re that honey. (”Lucy?”)
• It takes your microwave and all of your previously “instant on” electronics and appliances five minutes to recover from a crash?
• Your home flashes an error message, and your home and everything in it disappears because you didn’t save in a new file?
• Your home has obtained a virus and has to be quarantined from other homes?
• You can’t figure out Home’s many-thousand-page operating manual — neither can your kid, oy — and Amazon and all brick and mortar shops are out of “Smart Homes for Dummies?”
• Your one-stop-shopping bill that bundles your energy, cable, phone, and broadband services offers the worst of each service — everything goes out in a storm, service is provided by former cable company technicians, and you get interrupted during dinner constantly about switching to a new provider?
• The nanotechnology security system—which is smaller than a piece of dust — went up your child’s nose but no one knew because it couldn’t be seen and each time he sneezed, your alarm went off?
• Your refrigerator and the items in it and your dishwasher and detergent are communicating more than the — um — spouses?
• Robots can operate everything in your ID-enhanced house and decide human inhabitants aren’t needed because they just make a mess?
• Your “Smart Home” can’t keep pace with the Jones’ homes that are smarter?
• You’re kept on hold with bad music daily trying to reach Tech Service about your home network, which keeps going down? (That music is one of the ways in which the term “bad” reintroduces itself to you while waiting for someone to service you!)

The future is not about living like the Jetsons, and most of the cool stuff coming will be subtler and more seamless than the introduction of a pad that makes your own look schmaltzy. Hug your house.

Thought experiment time.

Pretend for a moment that the nation’s publishers met Godfather-style in a smoke-filled room somewhere high atop midtown Sixth Avenue. Everyone is there: The Random House overlords; the Simon & Schuster bosses; the charming and benevolent folk who run McGraw-Hill. All the other bigwigs. In the corner there’s a nice dairy tray with lox and whitefish, but no one’s paying attention to that. The business at hand is way too life and death. The industry heads agree – yes, they’ve been flooding the marketplace with too many books. Too many authors for too many niches and too few eyes.

So they’ve reached a decision. They’re tightening the reins and establishing what amounts to a basement. Let the Internet have its laissez faire free-for-all. That’s what it’s intended for, damn it. But the ink-and-binding set will move in the opposite direction: only credentialed, worthy writers get to publish under commercial banners. Word tumbles down to the editorial gatekeepers that, yes, or rather no, there will be no more taking chances on just anyone’s two bit thesis. Err on the side of exclusion. If something looks like it should be relegated to the vanity presses, it should.

“We can’t afford to take chances on a slush pile’s silt. The draw bridges are rising up, and we’re taking the express elevator to the upper floors of our ivory tower.”

So here’s the question: is there anything wrong with this?

Sure it’s elitist. But we’re evolving into a culture that can allow for a healthy dose of selective elitism when needed. You aren’t Spielberg? So what. Throw that video of your toddler angrily dropping Fuck-words on the family cat onto YouTube. If it’s compelling, a few million people will watch it. Or maybe they’ll prefer your neighbor’s video of Grandpa belching out the national anthem.

But you’ll be better off, either way, because the chance of someone in Singapore seeing your adventures in auteurism is much higher than if you decided to try for a dozen years to secure foreign distribution through Universal.

It’s an extreme and not completely analogous example, but there’s truth to it. Despite all those fancy technological advancements and truncated attention spans leading publishing gradually down the path to the dinosaur graveyard, books matter. They still have cachet. Having your name on the spine right above Knopf or St. Martin’s or Penguin-Putnam still means something to *you as a writer (*did I say me?).

But walk into any Barnes & Noble and look on those overflowing tables. Just gander at some of the people “playing author” right now. It’s one thing to be an expert in a particular field and have a little assistance, whether from a ghostwriter or a co-author, like many in business do. But some of these books are midlife crises with acknowledgments, an index and a marketing budget.

Just because you’re good at one thing, doesn’t mean that you’re a natural in another. It seems true in the book biz. Some people have compelling stories that should be told. Most people do not. And the filters are broken.

There’s a reason we call them vanity presses. They appeal to those self-absorbed bits of every person’s soul, or the bulbs that light whenever you pick up Tolstoy and murmur with your eyes ablaze, “Shit. I could do that.” So go ahead. Publish. Do it independently. Write up your masterpiece, put it on Amazon or in the back of your van, and take it to the people at a state fair. If it’s good it’ll sell—you just have to make them open it up.

The home-schooled child who wrote that dragon book proved just that. More likely, what you wrote is really just for your friends and associates…it’s not good and will not sell. At which point . . . think about giving up. Because just like it’s not every morning a shower karaoke balladeer winds up on Sony BMG, not every halfwit who can “keyboard” (type) and spare time to jot it down, should wind up clogging an already ridiculously congested publishing pipeline.

[I will add that just because you aren’t a pro writer doesn’t mean you need to stop reading books and posting fantastic blog comments….]