Borders Sings the Blues (to the tune of bankruptcy)

Professor walks into a bookstore. Professor is looking for a copy of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. Instead, Professor finds Jersey Shore’s J-WOWW signing books. A humorous anecdote told in my Literature of the West class by Professor Contreras may have incited a roar of laughter, but it should be sadly noted that, it’s funny because it’s true.

Bookstores are (and have been for some time) trading out literary icons such as Cormac McCarthy for 15-minutes of fame (or in this case, 3 seasons worth) pseudo celebrities, such as J-woww. In fact, the entire MTV reality crew is diving into the shallow pool of publishing; Snookie came out with a novel entitled A Shore Thing, while J-Woww opted for non-fiction to release her life lessons in The Rules According to J-woww.



Not only are bookstores selling out, they’re shutting down fast. Within weeks, Borders is slated to close a whole 200 stores across the country.



So who killed who first? Why all the dead Borders? While some surmise that it’s simply because people don’t read anymore, media doctors diagnose it with “a failure to understand the digital revolution.”

While back in the nineties, the battle in the world of books may have been; big chains vs. your local independent bookstore (i.e. You’ve Got Mail), now the opposing teams have multiplied thus resulting in one-huge-book-massacre. Now, it’s the big-chains versus the web, versus the ipad, the kindle, versus the fact that readers don’t read books!



The Ipad: Your new local bookstore?

Think about how much time the average person spends reading blogs, surfing the web, playing video games, watching tv in comparison to what that time-crunch may have been say, twenty even ten years ago. The media is going to war to win over your time and more importantly, you money. Why spend it on us when you can get it for free!

Media Industries Professor, Brian Rose offers some enlightenment to the situation: “The imminent death of bookstores, or more exactly chain bookstores, is, sadly, the inevitable result of overexpansion, pricey real estate (in a sour economy), and the inability to compete against online retailing. More pressingly, the continued growth of e-books (now 10% of all books sold), makes it difficult for chain bookstores to compete with the instant gratification available with a cheaper download. Very sad--but interestingly, it may mean that the only survivors are independent bookstores, who not only started the concept of book retailing, but have a much firmer grasp on how to reach their literate, neighborhood customers.”

So the demise of the chain doesn’t mean death for everyone, in fact it could mean a ressurecction for independent bookstores (like my personal favorite independent in the West Village THREE LIVES & CO.) Last year I wrote a paper in Rose's class about the demise of the Independent Bookstore and now we're bracing for its comeback? Talk about karma!

Oh, and Professor Contreras never did find that McCarthy book. Borders doesn't carry it.

Santa Brought American Studies Loot!

Finals are finally over! I hope every one is having a relaxing break with family & friends!

It's the day after christmas & I'm wondering: what did Santa bring all the American Studies Majors?

I had a particularly fortuitous christmas this year: lots of cookies and lots of american pop-culture paraphernalia! Or as news-satirist-extraordinaire, Stephen Colbert tweeted this morning "I got everything for Christmas! That's right: I asked for everything!"

Here's a run-down of the best gifts I found under my tree, hoping to see yours as well!


#1. The Best American Essays of the Century (edited by Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Atwan)

I never thought I'd say this, but boy was I glad to find this 568-page-book Christmas morning! This hefty collection includes the finest American essayists (some of my included favorites: E.B. White, Joan Didion, James Baldwin & Mark Twain) and aims to be "more or less a chronological story of America as the century unfolded." God-willing and sans-homework, I'll be able to make a dent in it before next semester. Perhaps the reading will prepare me for my American Studies class in the Spring, "American Voice"? Who says a Christmas present can't kill two birds with one stone?



#2. DVD Box Set of The Pacific

Produced by box-office-hit makers Stephen Speilberg and Tom Hanks, The Pacific (debuted on HBO in 2001) recounts the true stories of marines who fought against the Japanese in World War II. Now, I am no history or war- buff, but as a media junkie I can attest that this miniseries is exciting, moving and most of all: addicting. So it's probably best to get started watching now, seeing as starting it during the semester may become dangerous to your G.P.A.



#3. SPACEBALLS!

In my opinion, definitely one of Mel Brooks' bests! This Star Wars parody hit the screens in 1987 and made fun of just about every American stereotype under the sun: no gender, race or religion was left mercy! Regardless, it's pretty hilarious. It also pokes fun at shameless product placement and Star Wars' movie merchandising: an important shift in the American movie business. Star Wars was the first film to prove that merchandising can make just as much, if not more than box office revenue. Here, director George Lucas decided to trade in a small writer's/director's fee for 40% of the Star Wars merchandising rights. A wise move on Lucas' part, as the film made 4.2 billion worldwide, the merchandise took in double that! This was actually a test question on my Media Industries final last year: What did the American movie business learn from Star Wars? I wrote: Merchandising = $$$ (Thanks Professor Brian Rose!)



Mel Brooks as the treacherous President Skroob sniffs 'Perri-Air'



Screenshot of Spaceballs: The Toilet Paper



Evil-Villain Pizza-the-Hutt





Now that I think about it, this post itself seems a bit like one big product placement. Apologies, I assure you no company has endorsed me to blog about this! It's just that since it's the holidays, expect me to be reading less primary (scholarly) works and more pop-culture media texts!

Cabritismo

We were talking about cabritismo at dinner the other night. Cabrito is goat in Portuguese. A goat, when tied to a post, will eat all the grass in its reach, down to the roots, denuding the ground in a sweeping circle along the radius of his line. Cabritismo is this ultimately self-defeating greed.

Mozambican friends claim that it is standard practice in business here. An employee skims away at the margins of his or her employer's business, even at the risk of threatening his or her own employment by bringing down the company. Our dinner guest told us about a rather heroic newspaper editor here who's been running an opposition paper. Among many of the daily, petty thefts he dealt with, we learned about an elaborate scheme to steal a few hundred newspapers each week as they were delivered from the printer; not much in money, but enough to make it even harder for him to run his business.

Coincidentally, the next morning over coffee, I read this passage, from a piece by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, on Adam Smith's archetypal idea, the invisible hand:

…one can't grasp the idea of the invisible hand without the balancing idea of the imaginary inner witness. All those [inner] moral judges are what let the invisible hand work….The narrow animal instinct is not to trade and exchange and invest; it is to hoard and guard and pillage. The acquired human trait is the market trait, and it depends on trust, sympathy. To see what happens in the absence of trust, one need only consider the recent history of the developing world; if there is not civic capital, a network of trust, already in place, "privatization" just produces kleptocracy.

So, here is Adam Smith in 1776 understanding perfectly the cabristismo that markets, without sympathy and trust, produce. My wariness of neoliberal American ideas about unregulated markets is rather unexpectedly confirmed by looking west from Mozambique.

Focusing my gaze here, in Maputo, I see something I understand as history in action, something known intellectually, but now felt and observed. "Market man" is nothing natural, but a being cultivated--out of cultural habits, daily practices, and regulated rules of the game. I watch this cultivation in Mozambique with perhaps the same ambivalence that Adam Smith watched the unfolding of early capitalist marketplaces. Mozambique is galloping along in its development, but will it do so in ways that spark trust more often than cabritismo?

Developing States & Developing Nations: More Comparisons

I like Kaylyn's post on developing states in the United States. Here in Mozambique, we have been talking about the release of the latest Human Development Index by the United Nations.

It's always interesting and worthwhile to look at how the United States fares. Fascinatingly the United States jumped up to number 4 on the HDI this year** (had not been in the top 10 before) because of a new way of calculating the index that takes into account the average years of schooling. (Mozambique still remains in the bottom 5 by they way--165th of 169 countries.)

But check out the Gender Inequality Index**, where the U.S. ranks only 37th. Note our much higher maternal mortality rates and adolescent fertility rates--all tied to the politics of health care and reproductive rights in the U.S. Also check out our 17% women in Congress, vs. 39% for #1 Netherlands, and 47% for #3 Sweden.

**Note: have to click through the links to download pdf for full index.

American exceptionalism in the news

One of the more arcane of the keywords of American studies--"exceptionalism"--is currently in the news, as several Republicans have recently either denounced President Obama for not believing in American exceptionalism (despite the fact that he has publicly asserted that he does) or given speeches arguing for a restoration of a belief in American exceptionalism.

Here's a link to a front-page Washington Post story on the subject. I'd be interested in comments from readers of this blog, especially if you've read something about "exceptionalism" that you think would contribute to the discussion.

Wikileaks and the Cable Releases

Wikileaks- the website which brought us Collateral Murder, the Afghan War Diaries and the Iraq War Logs today released, according the the New York Times, a "quarter million confidential American diplomatic cables"

The cables could not be posted on the actual website, wikileaks.org, because they were under a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack, an attack on the website in which multiple systems overwhelm the bandwidth of the site, preventing it from being accessed. Instead Wikileaks gave the releases to multiple news sources including the Times which released some of the cables on its website but with some redactions to protect sources or civilians. (I was unable to access the wikileaks site Sunday until around 8pm, and when I could there was no information on the cable releases)

No one quite knows what the effect these releases will have on foreign relations (the cables include everything from intel. on the leader of Libya to a wedding in the Caucus mountains). But this release, and just the existence of the site in general, is a dramatic example illustrating how information is discovered and distributed in the age of the blog.

The cables were reportedly downloaded by an Army Pfc (for those who are not familiar with military ranks, a Private First Class is the second lowest rank) and talks of a possible leak had been going on in Washington for months. The editor-in-chief and spokesperson for Wikileaks Juilian Assange sent to the US government on the 26th asking for any particular redactions they felt would be necessary to protect lives, the response came overnight that if any cables were published it would endanger lives and that possession and distribution of the cables was illegal. The site went ahead with giving the cables to major news outlets, the Times published some of the cables with its own redactions on the 28th.

Wikileaks, internationally based, flew in the face of the US government by distributing these cables, and they became instantly available around the world. This information, though distributed through major news outlets, was collected on an individual level separate from the journalistic tradition, and would have been distributed via the Wikileaks site, an internet site run by a disjointed group reportedly consisting of Chinese dissidents, human rights activists, and former physicists and mathematicians.

The mediation between events and the public becomes smaller and smaller through sites such as wikileaks, the proliferation of blogging, and smartphones that can take and send pictures and video around the world at an instant's notice. Gone is the day of Watergate and the investigative journalism, now the power to reveal information lies in the hands of anyone with a computer and internet connection. Clay Shirky predicted 50 years of chaos surrounding the rise of peer-to-peer technology, and internet-enabled information sharing. Perhaps it will take that long to see the effects of Wikileaks in toto, but in the coming days and weeks we will undoubtedly get a glimpse into what this technology can do.

Friday at the ASA conference

I'm now blogging about the conference from back in New York, rather than blogging from the conference....but I was just too busy while in San Antonio to keep up!

Friday included two major highlights. The first was a morning panel specifically about the special issue of American Quarterly titled Nation and Migration: Past and Future...which just happens to be the central book we're using in the "Approaches to American Studies" course this year (For readers not in the program here at Fordham, that's the junior seminar on methodology for American Studies majors at Fordham). That's why I absolutely had to attend this panel, even though it conflicted with a panel discussion on "Critical Keywords for Early American Studies" that included as a speaker our own Senior Seminar co-instructor, Professor Ed Cahill.

The discussion was explicitly about how this special issue could be useful in the classroom and beyond (as opposed to simply being something that scholars in the field cite). On the panel were three people involved in editing the journal (Curtis Marez, who was the editor when it came out; Bruce Burgett and Grace Hong, who were on the editorial board) and three people who wrote essays in the journal (Elaine Peña, whose essay on a Guadalupan shrine outside Chicago provoked some lively discussion in the class a few weeks ago; Sarika Chandra, whose essay about Julia Alvarez we'll be reading right after Thanksgiving, and Sasha Costanza-Chock, whose essay on immigrant rights activists' use of the net we are not reading in the course). The first thing I got out of the panel was that I should have assigned Costanza-Chock's essay, because he made it sound amazing. It's hard to reconstruct the details of the discussion because it was so wide-ranging, but I will say that it was great to spend some concentrated time talking about teaching, and I got some great ideas for future assignments in this and other classes--and I think others in the room very much liked my description of what we do in the "Approaches" class. I hope it doesn't make you too nervous, juniors, to know that there are professors from a dozen or more universities around the country who may be checking out what you're writing in the Keywords Collaboratories....

The other highlight was the Presidential address by this year's ASA President, Ruth Wilson Gilmore. (I talked about her work briefly in my previous post). There's nobody out there who better combines meticulous scholarship with passionate activism, and who can better put them together into an inspiring, even theatrical lecture. (One reason: she started out studying theater...so you American Studies and Theater double major have someone out there to inspire you!). She managed to include in her talk some really compelling autobiographical narrative about growing up in New Haven, in the shadow of Yale, where her father had been a pioneering union and antiracist activist and she ended up attending as a student on a scholarship for children of employees; some amazing and disturbing statistics about the current economic and social situation in the U.S. (see Kaylyn Toale's recent post for an excellent source for such statistics); some practical advice about how to use our position in academia as a platform for activism (for instance, since the ASA organizes conferences that bring thousands of scholars to a hotel, it can use that clout to pressure hotels to treat their workers better); and some straightforward inspiration (it may seem an unlikely image, but there was a packed hall of perhaps 1000 academics whom she got to stand up and recite the last line of a poem that was her conclusion: "People like me will rise up)."

Two of many takeaways from this day. One is a pair of statistics that illuminate how extreme inequality has gotten in the U.S. in the past couple of decades.

• The top 20% of Americans own 84% of everything there is to own (cash, consumer goods, real estate...everything)...while the bottom 40% currently have negative net worth. Think about that.

And here's one for you students:

• Gross student debt in the U.S. just surpassed all consumer debt. In other words, students now owe more for their educations than everyone in the country puts together owes on their credit cards and related debt instruments. Think about that, too.
  

The other takeaway was more fun, and more personal. Gilmore's autobiographical narrative was all about growing up in New Haven, and I grew up there, too. Her reference points sounded familiar, and I remembered some of the events she mentioned, though I was a bit young to experience many of them directly. Later that evening, at the hotel bar, I ran into her and mentioned that I'd grown up in New Haven, too, and she asked me what street I'd lived on. "Oh, it's a tiny one-block street you've never heard of," I said, "Pelham Lane." She smiled; it turns out she grew up just about two blocks away from where I did, and that we'd gone to the same elementary school (though we hadn't overlapped there). Sometimes the world seems very small......