I’ve thought about posting my entries here before, but I worried I wasn’t allowed to if the contest was still continuing. But then I learned that Roger Ebert posts his entries on his Chicago Sun-Times journal page. Well, if Ebert can do it, so can I!
Here’s my (almost certainly) losing entry for contest number 340:
As Michelle Dean points out on the Rumpus today, Monday is the deadline for public comments on the Consent Decree in the settlement of the United States’ anti-trust lawsuit against publishers and Apple for allegedly colluding to fix the prices of e-books they sold to Amazon.
Michelle’s piece mentions Ken Auletta’s piece in the June 25 issue of the New Yorker (available here behind the magazine’s paywall), which provides an excellent, readable summary of the case, and the settlements, and the stakes of both. It’s fascinating reading. After I read Auletta’s piece, I felt, for the first time, like I really understood DOJ’s case, and the publishers’ case against the case.
As Auletta explains, the five publishers who signed onto Apple’s agency model (which allowed publishers to set e-book prices at $15 but let Apple keep a 30% commission), didn’t do so to preserve their short-term profits. They were still selling e-books to Amazon at $15 per book, and they made less under Apple’s agency model.
They did it to try to save bookstores.
Jonah’s Lehrer’s habit of recycling his own content is being referred to as “self-plagiarism,” which is, of course, oxymoronic, as Michelle Dean points out in this excellent piece. You can’t plagiarize yourself.
What he’s doing, it seems to me, is self-aggregating. He’s taking content from, say, Wired, that he wrote, and presenting it on the New Yorker as original work.
Who does this hurt?
Still, after all that sitting around in the courtyard eating sandwich halves, I had a nice feeling of sharing, so when they asked me if I had anything else to say I told them that in the beginning you understand the world but not yourself, and when you finally understand yourself you no longer understand the world. They seemed satisfied with that. Cops, they’re all so young.
From “Little Golf Pencil,” by Mary Ruefle, in Issue 13 of Ecotone, reprinted in this month’s Harper’s.
Here’s another exchange I had with the locals, this time with two young guys working in the Apple Store in the gift shop section of the Louvre:
Me: Bonjour!
Apple Worker No. 1: Bonjour!
Me: Je suis désole. Je suis un American. Je parle soulement en pieux Francais.
Apple Worker No. 1: It’s no problem. I speak a little English.
Me: Je voudre … uh . . Je voudre to buy a Macbook Pro.
Apple Worker No. 1: And?
Me: And that’s it.
Apple Worker No. 1: That’s it?
Me: Yes.
Apple Worker No. 2: That, we understand!
One of the exciting things about traveling to Paris is that you get to practice the French you’ve been learning in your classes at home. On actual Parisians!
My trip was no exception. Take, for example, this conversation I had, on the second day of my trip, with the waitress at a small bar in the neighborhood where I was staying:
Waitress: Bonjour.
Me: Bonjour.
Waitress: Pour boir?
Me: Uh …
Waitress: To drink?
Me: Oh! Si! I mean Oui! Yes, uh, je voudre …
Waitress: Just tell me what you want.
From the Wikipedia entry for the Galician-Portuguese word “Saudade”, which I discovered through the twitter feed of Anuskha Jasraj (@anushkajasraj):
Saudade was once described as “the love that remains” after someone is gone. Saudade is the recollection of feelings, experiences, places or events that once brought excitement, pleasure, well-being, which now triggers the senses and makes one live again. It can be described as an emptiness, like someone (e.g., one’s children, parents, sibling, grandparents, friends, pets) or something (e.g., places, things one used to do in childhood, or other activities performed in the past) should be there in a particular moment is missing, and the individual feels this absence. In Portuguese, ‘tenho saudades tuas’, translates as ‘I have saudades of you’ meaning ‘I miss you’, but carries a much stronger tone. In fact, one can have ‘saudades’ of someone whom one is with, but have some feeling of loss towards the past or the future.
By the way, Jasraj is the author of the gem “Radio Story,” which won the 2012 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for India. You can find it here, on Granta’s New Writing page: http://www.granta.com/New-Writing/Radio-Story
