502. Is Poetry Dead?

BROWDERBOOKS

I am now publishing two of my nonfiction titles as ebooks, with the help of an aggregator named Draft2Digital.  More of this anon.  

Does the term aggregator puzzle you?  Here is my favorite definition.   Aggregator: one that aggregates.  Does that clear it up?  If not, stay tuned.

                      IS  POETRY  DEAD?

"Poetry is dead.   It's an obsolete art form, just as much as cave paintings or silent movies.   It must have died around the year 1960, because that was when the last good poems were published."

This spurt of wisdom came to me online from Quora, a purveyor of cultural and other information that flashes regularly on my computer screen, I don't quite know why.  The author is a German pontificator, Roland Bartetzko by name, whose photo shows a faintly smiling man of middle years, far beyond the stage of youthful exuberance and joyous but ill-informed folly.

Herr Bartetzko, you're full of you know what.  You are uninformed, smart but stupid, misguided, ill-advised, presumptuous, and shockingly ignorant of literary history.

He goes on to question whether poetry can even exist in the wake of the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.  "There's only bad poetry left and only bad poets.  Too lazy to write more than few lines at once and unable to say anything substantial."  

Granted, he may be addressing the poetry scene in Germany, not here, but I suspect that he's totally misguided there as well.  

Fortunately, he observes, poetry isn't selling anymore.  Poets publish their "pathetic scribblings" in private and give them away as free handouts.  Poetry is now "a pastime of wannabe enlightened senior citizens.  If you have something to say, write prose."

So ends the spiel of this oracle, as translated and communicated online.  I never imagined myself a defender of poesy, but Herr Bartetzko's mouthings prompt me to assume this role.  I will confine myself to only a few trenchant remarks.

• The death of poetry -- like that of opera and diverse other art forms -- has been proclaimed before and always proven wrong. 
• Poetry has survived the collapse of the Roman Empire; the Black Death, which killed half of Europe; the French Revolution; the Industrial Revolution; the rise of the middle class; radio, television, and the Internet; 9/11; and the plague now in progress.  And it will survive Herr Bartetzko, too.
• Calamities don't kill poetry; they inspire it.

©  2021  Clifford Browder

501. Plastics: They Kill

BROWDERBOOKS

The Alliance for Independent Authors advises self-publishing authors to go WIDE in distribution.  This means making your book available on Amazon, IngramSpark (the other publisher of self-published books), Apple Books (only possible for those with Mac computers), Kobo, and other distributors that most Americans have never heard of.  

Then you should also hire an outfit called an aggregator to market your e-book -- a seeming duplication of your efforts that will get you distribution in places you could never access on your own.  Having done all this, you will have worldwide distribution of 97%, meaning that you have made use of almost all the distributors available.  To reach readers outside the US, this is necessary.  Kobo, for instance, is the prime distributor in Canada.  There is a market for English-language books not just in Britain, Ireland, and the Dominions, but also in India and Japan.  I'm hoping that a book about New York and New Yorkers will have appeal there.  The front cover is a big help.

My first step: Apple Books.  I have a Mac computer, so that's no problem.  But pray for me; their website is not user-friendly -- not to me, at least.  So far, I've just gone in circles there, but maybe I can finally figure it out.  And this is just distribution.  It is meaningless, unless marketing lets people worldwide know that you and your book exist.  

                 PLASTICS:  THEY KILL

In the 1967 film The Graduate, the young protagonist (played by Dustin Hoffman) is taken aside at a cocktail party by an older friend of his parents who has a single word of advice to give him.  “Are you listening?” the older man asks.  “Yes, sir,” says Hoffman.  And the oracle speaks: “Plastics!”

In the film it is a superbly humorous moment, but in the years since then plastics have turned into a lamentable fact of life — of all our lives — and have come to signify the artificial and superficial, the non-genuine, something oppressive and inescapable.  

Of course there are rare exceptions among us.  Andy Warhol, the Prince of Pop, called himself a “deeply superficial person” and embraced Hollywood because there “everything’s plastic, but I love plastic.  I want to be plastic.”  (See my book Fascinating New Yorkers, chapter 24, on Warhol.)

But “plastic” is now far more than a common concept and fact of life. It has become a threat of phenomenal proportions.  It is filling our landfills, choking our rivers, and polluting the world’s oceans.  And it will continue to do so for years to come, because it degrades slowly; like diamonds and true love, plastics are forever.  And tiny bits of plastic — microplastics — are everywhere, even in the food we eat and the air we breathe.

Yes, we’re recycling it.  Here in New York rigid plastics are recycled — those almond milk cartons, yogurt cups, pill bottles, and Ajax detergent containers that I put out with glass and metal objects, in hopes of improving the planet.  But what do I discard them in?  Old grocery bags: non-rigid plastic!  Try as you will, you can’t escape the stuff.

But at least those bags are getting reused.  The real villain of the story is what’s called single-use plastic: plastic items that are used once and then thrown away.  Some 80% of the plastic in the oceans comes from land-based sources, and most of it is single-use items.  

Well, I’m trying.  When I go to the supermarket, I take my purchases home in my shoulder bag, or in a cloth bag that is decidedly not plastic.  But gooey garbage soaks through paper bags, so in the kitchen I use plastic grocery bags instead.  I recycle paper and cardboard items — the bulky ones torn neatly into smaller pieces — but what did I used to put them in?  Those damn plastic grocery bags!  But now, being more environmentally aware, I put the stuff in paper bags.  

I survey the foods I buy.  That box of raisins — cardboard, therefore  recyclable.  But what about the wrapping of the raisins inside the box?  I check: paper, not plastic — well and good.  

My olive oil comes in a glass container — bravo! — but my bread, including even the organic bread I get in the greenmarket, comes, alas, in plastic wrapping.  Try as I do, some of what is in my kitchen is going to end up in the world’s oceans, where it will persist for a good five hundred years.

One consolation: my books — both those that I acquire and read, and those that I write and get published — are paper.  Yes, paperbacks, which means that they will in time deteriorate.  By way of contrast, the old hardcover books in my bookcases, their wounded bindings reinforced with tape, persist and endure.  Now there is quality.  But how about the sticky tape I’ve used to repair their wounded bindings?  Plastic!  Yes, inescapable.  I give up.

© 2021 Clifford Browder

500. Intelligentsia: Brains and Books or Diddled Dupes?

BROWDERBOOKS

For anyone who missed my ZOOM interview, here is a link to it on YouTube:   https://youtu.be/Esx0YYYQw8I

Another excellent review of Forbidden Brownstones, this one from Sublime Book Review.  The conclusion: “Forbidden Brownstones is an addictive novel that will charm, entertain, and mesmerize you; five stars for this wonderful, compelling read.”  The novel is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

INTELLIGENTSIA:  BRAINS  AND  BOOKS

                 OR  DIDDLED  DUPES?

I inherited a subscription to the New York Review of Books from my deceased partner Bob and now subscribe to it on my own.   Compared to its thorough reviews, those in the New York Times look flimsy.  But often it's the Classifieds section, next to the last page of the publication, that grabs me.   It's a perfect example of targeted marketing, when advertisers want to each a very specific and limited audience.  In this case, the intelligentsia, by which I mean people who read, write, and edit books, and ponder and debate their content.  In other words, intellectuals, a suspect group whose existence annoys both the hoi polloi and the politicians who covet their votes.  But these ads tell us a lot about who and what the intelligentsia are, their moods and needs and desires.  So let's find out who we are.  

"We?"  Yes, we.  Because readers of this blog, like the writer, fall into that class.  Like it or not, this is about us.  We'll look at the issue of NYRB of January 14, 2021.

First, there are the personals, usually older people seeking companionship: a "single gentleman, 71, good-looking and active," seeks a liaison with an "attractive unattached lady under 50."  Or an "MWM ERROR THEORIST" (yes, all in caps) wants to meet a "compatible F."  Common enough, let's wish them (us) all well. But how about these?

• TATTOOED, PIERCED, undercut-having, leather jacket-clad pansexual East Asian femme seeks whiskey-drinking, artifice-touting, anti-authoritarian aesthete to while the hours away with.  Accepting applications for both virtue & sin."
• WIDOWED MARGRAVE SEEKS RESPITE from coterie of sycophants.  Enclose your most prurient poem.

The first is eye-catching, but the second tops it.  And her e-mail address is lasciviousmargrave@xxxxx.  But maybe this one isn't us. She's allegedly a margrave; we are not.

Under PERSONAL SERVICES I find "EXCECELLENT MASSAGE BY EVA," prompting me to wonder just how "personal" it is.  (Honni soit qui mal y pense.)

And there is much more:

• a vacation rental for Yellowstone in winter;
• a full-floor condo in Paris;
• someone unnamed offering the "unfiltered truth" about your relationships; 
• someone offering to buy "mid-century design furniture"; 
• someone looking for philanthropic funding to save the planet;
• a "charismatic, aging French rock star" who will write an original song for you, your mom, your lover, or your pet in French, English, or Franglais;
• a ghost writer eager to help you write your book;
• PROUST-INK, a website selling an online course in Proust, and mugs and T-shirts bearing the master's image.

The biggest ad is for AIRBRUSH, the World's Finest Eye Cream, reg $68 but now only $54.40, though we can also have La Mer Eye Balm for $200.   

The most mysterious ad is for Athena Pheromones, a fragrance guaranteed to increase your attractiveness.  Discovered in 1986 by a Ph.D. in biology, it is not sold in stores, but has been proven 74% effective in two 8-week studies, and 68% effective in a 3rd 8-week study, $99.50 for men and $98.50 for women, free shipping in the US.

So what is one to make of all this?  The American intelligentsia (i.e., us)

• craves companionship, maybe with a massage (hmm) thrown in;
• likes to travel and live abroad;
• needs to know the truth about its relationships;
• wants to save the planet;
• wants design furniture;
• will pay for a song, even in a bastard French corrupted by English,  for its lover, mom, or pet;
• needs help in writing its book;
• has eyes in need of a cream or a balm (maybe from squinting too much at the fine print of academic publications);
• will pay almost a hundred dollars to boost its attractiveness.

But there is also another possibility: we are grievously insecure, and our insecurity makes us a prime target for every con, dodge, diddle, rip-off, and hoax conceivable.  So which one are we?  Your choice.  Probe hard, think, dig deep. 

©  2021 Clifford Browder