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[...] when I trawled for their names on the 1860 census I came up empty. No enslaved African American was named on an antebellum federal census; they were counted, eighty to a page, and the count was made, by 1860 at least, by supplying the rough age, sex, and color of the individual, either black or mulatto. Prior to the search, it had made sense to me that three generations back I might face a wall of silence. But when I discovered the simple facts, witnessed the script on the census ledger, and interpreted the hash marks in a column, the historical record took on another kind of life altogether. It seemed—well, the word I would use is close: uncomfortably present, not in the past, not safely tucked away at all.
When black Americans who barely knew the legal names of their own grandparents—people whose ancestry dates back to American shores for ten or eleven generations—look back to the era of bondage, we do this from the perspective of the families that we know today. The now-grandfatherly male cousins we have who have never, in all of their lives, had regular employment. The people known by “street” names, who never grew into adult names. The sisters, aunts, and female cousins raising children in poverty, sometimes with genteel flair, sometimes not. We are seeing immigrants of every hue offer lip service to our historic plight, take advantage of the legislation that we pioneered for two centuries, and then pass us by. We are thinking about the mental illness that seems as much a style as a neurological disorder. We are thinking about black people using illegal drugs and frowned-upon remedies for a hundred years for the same reason that tens of millions of Americans have sought prescriptions from physicians for relief. We are thinking about people who, for as long as they can recall, have experienced a simmering anger that was sometimes addressed with alcohol and narcotics, an anger that became a kind of manufactured commodity that fed an industry of incarceration, security, and hospitalization. We are thinking about neglected communities and decaying houses and public services that operate under multiple standards. We are thinking that in every new place we have ever traveled in the United States, we found a community with posh homes, quaint comfortable businesses that catered to desires we had yet to fully form, and regular traditions that we found enchanting and seductive—and yet just on the other side of the tracks were the crumbling huts for us. Even when these wore fresh coats of lavender or lime or canary or fuchsia paint, it didn’t ease our sight of blemish on the country that willed it.
this killed me
While it may seem odd, there are not many difficulties in adapting this model to the digital world: instead of buying a book and throwing it away after forty people check it out, a library simply buys a license to circulate an ebook forty times. Functionally, it’s the same. The problem is that where previously libraries could buy any book they liked on the open market for the same price that any individual would pay, the move to digital licensing allows publishers to enforce more fine-grained “library pricing.” Now, instead of paying $10.39 on Amazon for a copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and circulating that book until it falls apart, libraries will have to pay whatever publishers demand for the right to circulate a book a set number of times—probably a lot more than $10.39. It’s likely as well that libraries will eventually be competing with the literary equivalent of Netflix for the right to circulate ebooks. But while this new regime may force circulating libraries to cut back on the number of titles they provide, it won’t threaten their basic existence. Once publishers determine the market price to circulate a book, they will be all too happy to charge libraries that price.
omg fuck this
At the moment, most licensing arrangements for university libraries are set up so that students and faculty can log in and use the databases not just from the physical library but from anywhere in the world, twenty-four hours a day. University libraries can afford to pay for comprehensive access because they have a limited and well-defined user base—in the case of NYU, around 45,000 students, faculty, and staff. The New York Public Library can’t buy similar licenses because it has 1.9 million cardholders. “When a publisher hears that they get very nervous,” Denise Hibay, the library’s head of collection development, told me. That’s because if the New York Public Library did somehow persuade a company like ProQuest to let it buy licenses on the cheap, then NYU (and every other college and university in town) could just stop paying ProQuest and tell all their students who want access to sign up for a library card and log in through the New York Public Library.
abolish proquest tbh
We assume that the internet can only make it easier and cheaper to access information, but what the internet really does, when it’s commercialized, is commodify information. In the future, publishers will be able to determine exactly how often a specific book or article is accessed, try a few different prices, and charge whatever turns out to be most profitable. If that profit can be generated by selling advertising, then the book will be made available “for free”; if not, users will be forced to pay. In the case of romance novels, this means “ad-supported books”; in the case of scholarly journals, if you don’t have an institution to support you, it means paying $5.99 to “rent” a single article for one day, the price currently being charged by Cambridge University Press.
[...] The work the new Latino immigrants find—at construction sites or on the line at restaurants—can’t cover a down payment on a mortgage. They’re renters, not owners as their predecessors were, and so subject to owner move-ins and other means of tenant eviction. The value of properties in the Mission, Bernal Heights, Noe Valley, and Cole Valley, in proximity to the corporate shuttles of Google, Apple, Facebook, eBay, LinkedIn, and other dot-com employers, has risen 10 percent over the last six months alone. Latino tenants are moving out to Daly City, Stockton, Richmond, Gilroy, and Hayward—some of these places nearly an hour away on the inefficient and inconvenient commuter rail. But every morning they still come in, to build houses they can’t live in and make food they can’t afford.
WHEN ART FAILS TO IMITATE LIFE, even the unafflicted are driven to make their lives somehow imitate art. Building an inner world is exhausting: we look to film and television to show us versions of ourselves, to allow us to process our lives, to excuse them, and maybe to ennoble them. And yet, at this task, Hollywood is notoriously deficient. Some stories do not get told. Some identities are never offered up for examination.
i like this
IF YOU HAD TO PICK the first shot in this conflict, you could do worse than reread the section in The Corrections in which Chip Lambert, former holder of an “assistant professorship in Textual Artifacts,” teacher of “Consuming Narratives,” lecturer on phallic anxiety in Tudor drama, and casualty of a drug-fueled affair with an undergraduate, heads repeatedly to the Strand Bookstore to sell his large, costly collection of Theory. It is a miniature triumph of realist notation at its most aggressive. Starting with his Marxist theorists, whose collective sticker price of $3,900 is knocked down to $65, Chip works his way through “his feminists, his formalists, his structuralists, his poststructuralists, his Freudians, and his queers” to raise money for expensive dinners to impress a new girlfriend. Reduced at the end to “his beloved cultural historians,” Chip “piled his Foucault and Greenblatt and hooks and Poovey into shopping bags and sold them all for $115.” The pathetic, specific numbers, the terribly accurate roster of names (not just famous Continental names, but the kind of American academics that demonstrate Franzen’s realist-insidery expertise): this is what Theory is worth.
Scenes in which the vain things of this world are sold — auctions, foreclosures, negotiations with pawnbrokers — occur often in realist fiction, always expressing the hard principle that our ideals don’t translate into market terms. In the end, our fantasies or desires or self-delusions come to the bar, not of Truth, but of what others will give us for them.
[...] it is wise to be suspicious of those who claim to pursue selflessly the prosperity of others even as they pursue their own. [...]
[...] Silicon Valley investors and entrepreneurs taught the hackers to think of the people who used their products as assets to extract value from, rather than simple folk who through the kindness of programmers would learn about the infinite power of computers.