Chamber Four

Martin Amis

Here’s a quick weird thing. Martin Amis (60) and Joan Brady (70), a couple of old authors, somehow got in a spat about euthanasia, despite both supporting it.

It happened like this. Amis laid out his pro-euthanasia views—inspired by proximity to the ugly, protracted death of his stepfather—in an interview in the Sunday Times. Step two: the Times reported on its own interview here.

Then, Brady got in a snit and took Amis to task in the Guardian with this editorial, in which she says people should not be forcibly killed (that’s not what Amis said, but she linked to the Times’s self-reportage, so presumably she didn’t read the actual interview).

The Guardian’s book blog then simultaneously (check the timestamp) published this self-reportage of Brady’s editorial, in which they quote Brady saying she’s pro-euthanasia (which she didn’t say in the editorial) because of her proximity to the ugly, protracted death of her husband. Scoop!

Still with me? Once more, with alacrity: Amis says he’s pro-euthanasia in the Times, the Times quotes him in a filler piece about their own article, Brady reads the filler piece, rails against Amis in the Guardian, the Guardian runs filler piece about their own article, saying Brady is pro-euthanasia.

For those keeping score, that’s FOUR articles, ONE manufactured scandal, and ZERO stories of any substance whatsoever. [EDIT: OK, that's not quite fair. The original interview was pretty good, and covered a lot more than this one euthanasia thing. But the Times tried to cancel that out by playing up a couple of lines for controversy's sake.] Welcome to modern newspapership!

Nabokov would’ve loved this one.

Here’s author Sherman Alexie on last night’s Colbert Report, explaining why he doesn’t sell his books in digital format (i.e., why he’s terrified of ebooks). Among the eggs of knowledge he drops:

1. It’s easier for the government to spy on you when all your books are in one place.
2. The music industry doesn’t make any money because “somewhere between 75 and 95% of music is pirated.” (Airtight.)
3. Books will be easily pirated once digital. The industry will then fail and (he intimates) there will be no more books.
4. The Internet makes it so there’s no intellectual property and no “artistic ownership.”
5. Stephen King and James Patterson should especially be worried. (I would be petrified if I were either of them. I’m not sure … exactly what I’d be scared of … but I’d be petrified.)
6. If authors did more readings, that would fix everything—but they can’t.

So basically the same ol’ stuff with an extra dose of paranoia.

Look, I get it: it’s fun and easy to be scared of digitization. But to say that 95% of music is pirated and that books are dying because not enough authors are “storytellers”… that’s a stretch. Books are dying because we publish 400,000 a year in the U.S. alone—99.9% of which are complete garbage—and even an avid reader can only read 50 of those. What you got there is a three-legged goat.

[UPDATE: I think Alexie was talking about this report that likes to throw around the stat that "95% of music is pirated." What they mean by it, however, is tough to decipher. They don't mean that their sales are down 95%, which their phrasing implies. Instead, they apparently mean that 95% of albums and song are pirated by at least one person. Which is a stat that means nothing to anyone. Except, evidently, Sherman Alexie.]

Also, while we’re on the subject, if you’re popular enough to be pirated, you’re probably making a decent living. If you embrace as wide an audience as possible, you will become more popular and more wealthy. That’s the way it is.

Also… not selling your books on Kindle isn’t going to “save white culture.” Just to clarify.

Anyway, enough of me—here’s the video: