Professor Diablo's True Review: The Video

There's now a snazzy video of the performance (music, video, Moby-Duck) that I posted about here last April.

Professor Diablo’s True Revue I: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea from Center for Documentary Studies on Vimeo.

Good-Bye (For Now) to All That

I've neglected this blog since last April mostly because I learned then that I will be heading to Ann Arbor in September on a Knight-Wallace Journalism fellowship, which will give me eight months to begin work on a second book--a project bearing little resemblance to Moby-Duck, at least so far as subject matter goes. (No more seafaring for me. I've had my seaward peep, and now will be trying to peep both eastward and into the past. More on this later--much later.)

The last few months I've been preoccupied with the logistics of leaving New York. The date of the move swiftly approaches. An Ann Arbor lease has been signed. A truck big as a boat has been reserved. Many boxes have been packed. We've built a ziggurat out of them in the living room. We've been trying to reassure M. & B. about the move by describing the delights awaiting them in their new home. We're in a transition, in other words, and my preoccupations are not the same ones that preoccupied me when I created this blog. They're still fatherly and bookish, but not as watery as they once were.

There are a few items that have collected in my file of things to post about. I'll try to get to them before September 1. Thereafter, the terms of the Knight-Wallace Fellowship (an eight-month sabbatical for journalists) wisely prohibit publication of any sort, including blogging. 

Professor Diablo's True Review

Next week, at the invitation of Duncan Murrell and Duke's Center for Documentary Studies, I head to North Carolina to join forces with the musician Django Haskins and the media artist Marina Zurkow. Details from press release below.

The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University (CDS), in cooperation with the Durham's Casbah, is pleased to announce the launch of Professor Diablo’s True Revue, a collaborative performance of writers, musicians, visual artists, and others who make extensive use of documentary fieldwork and research in the creation of their art. The inaugural evening will begin at 7 p.m. on April 24th at Casbah.  The theme for the first show, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, will feature a writer (Donovan Hohn) whose first book is a story about rubber ducks, plastic, and the mysteries of the ocean; a Guggenheim Fellow and media artist (Marina Zurkow) whose latest work in animation and manga explores the agency of petrochemicals and plastics; and a songwriter (Django Haskins) of exceeding plasticity and range. Future performances of Professor Diablo’s True Revue will explore themes such as love, war, and food, and will feature all new artists, writers, and musicians. “We want to expand the audience’s idea of what a ‘documentary’ work can be,”  said Duncan Murrell, Writer in Residence at CDS. “And we’re going to do this with artists whose work relies on the immersive research and fieldwork that we champion at the Center. Something that’s more than a reading, more than an opening, more than a night of music— a performance that’s unique and unexpected, and yet seems harmonious and inevitable when it’s done.   “We hope that we’re beginning something that will have real longevity and become a valued and complementary addition to the growing literary and arts scenes here in Durham and in the Triangle,” Murrell said. “It’s going to be fun.”

NASA: Animation of Tsunami Debris

Another visualization from the wizards at NASA, this time illustrating the likely drift of the debris unloosed by Japan's 2011 tsunami. (via Julia Whitty's Blue Marble blog)

NASA's Earth Observatory captions:

This animation shows the output of the Surface Currents from Diagnostic (SCUD) model, an attempt to simulate where and how that debris would disperse. Orange and red shaded areas represent parcels of water with a high probably of containing floating debris. The deeper the red color, the higher the likely concentration. The debris field stretches roughly 5,000 kilometers by 2,000 kilometers across the North Pacific.

Perpetual Ocean

Craig Pittman, author and enviro reporter for the Tampa Bay Times, alerts me to this amazing visualization of the ocean currents, brought to you by the wizards at NASA.

On Ebooks and the Economics of Book-Selling in 2012

One of my favorite stops on my recent paperback tour was Porter Square Books in Cambridge, MA. A book-seller there by the name of Josh Cook recently wrote a long blog-post about the economics of book-selling in 2012. I found it illuminating, and I recommend it to readers and authors alike. 

I'll highlight one section. Concerning the costs of e-books, Josh writes:

To be honest, the persistence in the belief that ebooks should cost radically less than books is a little baffling, given that most of the articles that touch on the issue of ebooks point out that ebooks do not cost significantly less to produce than books. I'll read an article mentioning that the material overhead of production represents about 10% a books' overhead and sure enough someone in the comments field will argue that $9.99 ebooks are a publisher wide conspiracy. But what really baffles me about the persistence of this belief is how it also manages to fly directly in the face of conventional business wisdom. 

No matter what a business does or sells the biggest chunk of its overhead is almost always going to be salaries for employees. This is practically a business axiom. And yet people seem to (or want to) believe that this axiom doesn't apply to ebooks. All of the people who produce an ebook are the same people who produce a book. Same staff, same amount of staff hours, same amount of employee overhead. Why should their prices be radically different? The problem is, of course, (I bet you can guess what I'm going to say) is that early in ebooks Amazon sold ebooks at dramatic, one might even say “predatory,” losses in order to encourage sales of their Kindle and “secure” ebooks market share. They created a price expectation completely disconnected from the actual cost of production. . . .

The thing is, the ebook price of a book should be able to come down over time. Once the overhead of the author's advance, editors' salaries, administrative assistants, janitors, publicity and the like, have been made back, the material cost difference becomes meaningful. Older ebooks, backlist ebooks, or even ebook editions of very popular books could end up in the price range people seem to want. And we already accept this idea of falling prices of books. The first hardcover edition of a book is more expensive, not just because of the cost of materials, but because it is the first opportunity for a publisher to make back all that people based overhead. When it comes out in paperback, the price difference (often about $10-12) doesn't just come from cheaper materials, but from having less of the initial overhead to cover. A fair ebook price would start out at 10-15% off the least expensive print edition (and most retailers would probably add an additional discount on top of that, given how little overhead they cost book stores), drop with each new cheaper print edition, and then, once the initial investment has been made up, drop a little bit further. In this model, they won't hit $.99, but this isn't a pack of gum we're talking about. This is the product of thousands and thousands of hours of work, that you can enjoy over and over again. For readers who put price first, it really isn't any different than waiting for the paperback or mass market edition, or, if you're really stingy, waiting for copies to enter the used book market, or, if you're really really stingy (or have run out of room in apartment), getting the book for free out of the library.

Why Read Moby-Dick? Some more answers.

Chad Harbach, interviewed in the New Statesman, fields the question--well.

And then there's Herman Melville. The baseball team in The Art of Fielding is named the Harpooners, an allusion to Moby-Dick.Moby-Dick is a book that I read in college and was astounded by. I think it's the most musical novel in the English language - the rhythms and the prose are incredible. It surpasses anything that anyone has ever done.
It's also a very funny book, which no one ever gives it credit for. Before I read it, I'd always heard it spoken of in these stern and forbidding tones, as if you were being scared away from reading it. But then you read it and you find it's both bold and musical.

An earlier attempt of mine to answer a similar question, in an interview with The New Yorker's Book Bench blog, here. Another one here. And here's a sampling of what I said of the novel in the talk I gave earlier this month at UCSB:

Sometimes when trying to explain my harebrained quest, I simply blame Herman Melville, whose novel I’d read an unhealthy number of times. People think of Moby-Dick as a difficult book, and it does have hard words, and long sentences, and it can at times seem bewildering, or dense. But it’s also funny, raunchy even, and it is full of marvels, and there’s heart-pounding action. All that, and it also contains passages that read like something out of a biblical book of wisdom, like Ecclesiastes, passages like this: “There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.” That’s like some sort of riddle, isn’t it? Or a Buddhist koan. But turn it around in your head a while.