Primrose Road

As several writing blogs have reported, Amazon.com will continue to list but no longer sell print-on-demand books, apparently because it now has its own POD service, Booksurge.

This is somewhat interesting ethically. Here's why:

1) Amazon's move has the potential to kill POD outlets who present themselves as "traditional publishers" (i.e. PublishAmerica) and prey on young and inexperienced writer-hopefuls. Authors may be more likely to realize, upon learning that their books will not include a "buy" button on Amazon, that PublishAmerica (along with similar businesses) is not a "traditional publisher," but rather a printer who makes money by selling books to authors, not readers. In other words, the fake duck (POD businesses who masquerade as real publishers) won't look so much like the real duck anymore.

2) Yet Amazon appears at this point to be motivated by a desire to monopolize the POD industry, only selling POD books printed by their own POD service. Remember, POD in general isn't such a bad thing: it can be useful for printing a small book with a small run for a small, specific group of people (for example, a family history for a family reunion. Ironically, you'd likely take in more money this way than if you printed a novel intended for public consumption through a POD service, because you wouldn't have to spend anything on marketing!). Therefore, while it's terrific that Amazon might potentially kill POD scams, it seems unfair that it could also kill non-scam POD printing businesses.

Interestingly, watchdog site Preditors and Editors, currently being sued by PublishAmerica for libel and also trying to bring up a civil suit against the scam, does not support Amazon.com's decision "because it would set a dangerous precedent for other print-on-demand publishers and their printers who could be forced out of business." Here's hoping, then, that PublishAmerica gets brought down by the civil suit and not by Amazon.com's odd (yet not unheard of) move to promote its own service.

Was thinking today about how contemporary Jewish atheists call themselves humanists, as do many of the (nonetheless brilliant) people involved in the "new" atheism and skeptical movements.

Humanism's too much of a throwback to Enlightenment for me. Not the "scientifically study the natural, reject the supernatural" Enlightenment, but the "only (certain privileged) humans can shed light on what's been kept in the dark" humanism.

"This breaks with the whole philosophical tradition which placed light on the side of spirit and made consciousness a beam of light which drew things out of their native darkness. Phenomenology was still squarely within this ancient tradition; but, instead of making light an internal light, it simply opened it on to the exterior, rather as if the intentionality of consciousness was the ray of an electric lamp ... Things are luminous by themselves without anything illuminating them: all consciousness is something, it is indistinguishable from the thing, that is from the image of light."

-- Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1

Or, enlightenment without human or supernatural involvement:

"Artworks participate in enlightenment because they do not lie: They do not feign the literalness of what speaks out of them."

-- Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

So "things" are always-already enlightened, minus God, minus anything supernatural, minus privileged human enlighteners.

Progress on the dissertation so far: Thinking = easier; Writing = hard. (Blogging = somewhere in between?)

I wonder what it says about my site, readers, and/or the Internet that for the third month in a row, the most visited page on Primrose Road is a news item I posted back in August about a twelve-year old boy in court because his father wants him to undergo circumcision against his will.

I've been looking at Shakespeare-inspired card and board games during my time at the Folger (there's *really* not that much for a new media person to do in the archives, though, contrary to popular belief, I do read and make use of Early Modern documents); the games will allow me to at least contextualize some of my work on how very un-new and unexciting "interactivity" is.

Saturday morning (yep, I spend Saturday mornings in the li-berry this term), I looked at a card game from 1900 and a checkers game from 1865. Since I'm most likely not going to write about the card game (and therefore don't have to worry about self-plagiarism), I wanted to share some of the rather hilarious (and sometimes justalittle blatantly racist, sexist, and/or essentialist) questions posed to game players. If you answer all of them correctly, you win either $5000 in chips from the Atlantic City casino of your choice, a batch of mascarpone brownies, a "Fight Sexism" Purim gragger, or absolutely nothing, depending on my mood.

Questions are all taken from "The Study of Shakespeare: An Instructive Game" (Camden, Maine: Shakespeare Club, c. 1900).

1. What is the name of a savage and deformed slave?
2. What is the sweetest and happiest of all Shakespeare's comedies?
3. Who was a genius without moral fiber?
4. Who was one of the most fascinating women in the world?
5. Who fell in a brook accidentally and was drowned? (Easy one, but I thought it was funny that they totally ignored the whole discussion about whether or not she deserved a Christian burial.)
6. What play may America claim as suggesting and shaping?
7. Who possessed those winning ways that give the weaker half of mankind so much influence for good and evil over the stronger?

I was invited to spend Easter Sunday with some of my father's Catholic relatives, which is exciting, because it means I can bring whatever I want food-wise (i.e. baked goods with lots of cheese). Passover's in mid-April this year, and gefilte fish is terrifying.

Happy Easter to all who celebrate the holiday!

NB (and inside joke): I await your comment about why my immediate family and I should not be participating in Easter celebrations, tdaxp. ;)

FYI: There's a short writeup on the Arden project in this month's Wired, which includes "Ted Castronova's 5 Tips for Making Games That Don't Suck."

The Daily News and New York Post tend to not be the most intelligent rags on the newsstand, and I'm finding it somewhat annoying that, by their jumping on the story of David Paterson and his wife's self-confessed extramarital affairs, both papers made it look like Eliot Spitzer was forced out of office simply because he cheated on his wife.

Spitzer resigned (and would have otherwise likely been impeached) because he knowingly committed a federal offense. He's an awful man for potentially exposing his wife to AIDS by refusing to use a condom when visiting prostitutes, but that type of judgement should probably sit outside the political sphere, because my "family values" aren't your "family values" and yours aren't mine.

The Carnivalesque Jewish holiday of Purim begins tonight, and, yes. it is a mitzvah to get drunk on Purim.

It's one of those situations where Carnival serves an ultimately conservative purpose, though, because the costumes and cookies are all about hiddenness, where we're supposed to remember that God's hand is in everything, and that even when it seems that he's not there, he's responsible for all our successes. (Note that we're always responsible for our own failures, and that we're not supposed to take failures and tragic events to mean that God is crapping on us. Impeccable logic.)

Wait, I promised you a funny Purim story, not an atheist rant.

When I was in the first grade, my Sunday school teacher used a slideshow to teach us about the story of Purim. (Yes, kinderlekh, there was no such thing as PowerPoint in 1985.) The first part of the story, as it's sanitized for children, tells of King Ahashueros banishing Queen Vashti from his Persian kingdom (what actually happens in the Megillah: he beheads her) and holding a "costume contest" for all the young women in town in order to decide who his next queen will be (in the Megillah: King A. doesn't "judge" them by their, uh, costumes). According to the bowdlerized story, the beautiful Esther was the only woman who didn't show up dressed in costume, and the king immediately fell in love.

One slide in the slideshow consisted of King Ahashueros sitting on his throne, looking out at the line of eager women hoping to be queen. Esther was amongst them, in a lovely pink dress. The woman in front of Ahashueros -- one of many who could never compete with Esther -- was dressed as a potato.

A potato.

That day, I believe we learned the following lesson: if she's going to marry a Very Important Man, a Jewish woman must never, ever look like a potato.

It's spring break, and though I still have 21 papers to grade and much dissertating to do, I dragged the Sig. Other to Atlantic City for a quick escape from said grading and dissertating. OK, I didn't really *drag* him, but I have a feeling he's going to call Gamblers Anonymous on my behalf sometime soon ... ;)

(In my family, you always vacation near a casino, and you learn to play poker at the age of four.)

An update on one of very few non-headless Lenin statues in the United States:



Lenin, who stands outside the Red Square restaurant, now carries a ... martini?

Then there was



which, unfortunately, was a Michael Godard "gallery." The guy calls himself the number one selling artist in the US and a "rock star artist," but I find saxophone-playing olives to be more suburban-kitchen-kitsch than rockstar.

The ocean's still notably unkitschy, though.