The indie label has long been a badge of honor in the music industry, even though these days it’s just another marketing strategy for the selling of music.  Still, being an indie band on an indie label carries a certain amount of street cred that appeals to a certain audience that sees itself outside the mainstream, even though outsider status can be seen as just another consumer choice.

With the advent of the Internet, the idea of independent media has been completely redefined from this idea of consumer choice.  The Internet is the ultimate form of independent media, granting creative freedom and creative distribution rights to anyone with a computer, without traditional hierarchical restrictions.  The way the internet has changed how we buy and listen to music has not only broken the supply chain of the major players in the music industry, it has also rendered irrelevant the difference between indie and mainstream, except as marketing labels.  Even the concept of “album” has been dismantled by iTunes by-the-song structure.  The same independence has also happened to the way we produce, distribute and consume movies, TV shows, and the news.  Websites like You Tube break down hierarchical barriers by making almost everything by anyone available, free of charge.  Through this strategy, the Internet has altered the chain of supply and delivery by replacing traditional narrow channels of production and distribution with free and/or open access.

The same can be said about the blogosphere.  As democratic mainstream journalism strays from its mission of reporting facts and telling truths toward the promotion of ideological agendas and biased party politics, blogs have picked up the slack and become legitimate sources of information.  In this way, the Internet has leveled the difference between amateur or citizen journalists and the professional journalists of the mainstream media.  It is this leveling power, the destruction of hierarchy and the opening of access to everyone for production and distribution of creativity that defines the Internet as a truly radically transformative media form.

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Their major argument is: “we teach students nuanced thinking and complex problem solving through the interpretation of literary texts.”   Unlike many humanities profs, I actually took a decade off from academia and worked in the corporate world, and I can tell you not once did I ever hear anyone attribute their success in management to skills learned from interpreting literature.  Managers are paid to do one thing: make decisions and take responsibility for those decisions.  They’re not paid to make the right decisions, as the Peter Principle continues to show, they’re paid to make decisions.  If someone can find an interview with some superstar CEO or entrepreneur who attributes their wealth and success in business to literary interpretation, well, your research skills are better than mine.  Sorry, but the ability to do a complex, nuanced reading of Sarah Orne Jewett does little, if anything, to prepare you for the daily corporate grind. If these LA skills really were that magical in the workplace, most humanities profs would have left academia long ago, cashed in on their supposed mastery of these skills, and retired to a life of helping the poor and downtrodden, instead of exploiting an underclass of grad students and adjuncts to keep their privileged, tenured positions from the budget ax.

The mainstream media often praise the current occupant of the Oval Office for his “complex and nuanced” thinking, but as we’ve witnessed over the last year, this is just code for an inability to make tough, difficult decisions.

You can read the whole series of (frankly dispiriting) articles at www.chronicle.com (subscription may be required).

Chandler had knocked around Europe for nearly eight years.  With a Ph.D. in English and a couple of visiting assistant professorships at backwater state universities under his belt, he’d been able to scrape by teaching English and doing various odd consulting jobs in advertising and corporate management.  He’d taught in companies across the continent, at a Swiss Hotel school, a university on the Gianicolo in Rome, even at a German medical school for a couple of years.  Munich, Paris, Marseilles, Venice, Rome, Montreaux, Madrid, a winter’s downtime skiing in the Dolomites, a summer sunning on the red-tiled coast of Croatia, his itinerary read like the stickers plastered haphazardly on a 1920s Bright Young Things travel trunk.  He’d found academia too divorced from experience, too snug and safe, too cowardly to confront real life, and so he walked away to wed himself to an uncertain future of border crossings and experiments in living.  I want to become a chanter of personality, he’d said.

After all those years of walking the tightrope, he’d returned to where he started from.

I never understood or agreed with why he left, and now I wanted to understand why he’d come back to our little stubble-plain, high desert town.   Although Chandler saw himself as an outsider, the ironic truth is being an outsider is just one more route to becoming an insider.  Assume the radical stance, criticize the American Dream well enough, and eventually you’ll be rewarded with the American Dream.  In my view, why bother with all that posturing and party line rebellion, when in the end the destination is always the same?

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There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself. —Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

Cloud Seven

Looking back, it seemed like a good idea at the time.  Looking back, he could always blame it on her, the pierced, tattooed, i-Poded brunette, Prada sunglasses black areolas around her eyes, cell phone/camera lanyarded around her neck, swinging like a pendulum out of Poe, digital organizer cradled in one hand, a double-tall, no-doubt nonfat, caramel-laced coffee monstrosity in the other, as well as a leash looped around her right wrist trailing back to the trendy, midget dog du jour, she of the thrift store chic and Neiman Marcus makeover who walked right into him on Pine Street without looking up, and then blamed the ensuing materialistic, caramel-laced mess on him, supplying the Damascus moment so necessary to those waiting to see the light.  Looking back, he could comfort himself with the ridiculous notion that no matter what decision he made it was always the wrong decision, but in the history of wrong decisions this one ranked right up there with invading Stalingrad in the winter.  Looking back, somewhere, in the fog and mist of memory, lay the answer, the WHY.  He needed to know the WHY.  Why had he walked away from his comfortable life, why had he embarked on this particular course, why had he convinced himself he could easily adapt to a new and different environment, far away from family, friends, and personal history? Looking back–he couldn’t stop looking back, especially into the swirling Seattle fog and mist and rain of that last particularly nasty Pacific Northwest winter.  Could a simple crushed heart among the Cascades really be the root cause of all of this?

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This romantic notion of the power of the imagination has always been metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, the illusion that something that isn’t there is more important than something that is there.  The defenders of this alchemical power—and they are legion—point out that even though memoir is supposed to be telling the truth about ourselves and our experiences, no matter how truthful we may appear to be the memoir writer is always also being untruthful; telling is also not telling, because when we select details, events, and people to include in a memoir, we also choose to leave out other details, events, and people.  Indeed, the very notion that our lives can be told in nonfiction narrative form is itself a fiction.   The truth of writing, then, is that there is no truth, except for the truth that writing reveals through the act of altering, staging, fictionalizing.  Even nonfiction is fiction because the world cannot be captured in language.   As the literary theorists have it, there is always ever a lacuna between the signified and the signifier.

The fiction of fiction is that it contains a higher truth, that the made-up is more real than real.  That’s the sleight-of hand-man’s con.  Nietzsche said, “there are no facts, only interpretations.”  He was wrong.  There are facts, as well as interpretations of facts.  Someone else may interpret them differently, but the facts remain fact.  In writing about experience I could change the names, the places, and the details for a variety of reasons, including the shakedown that by fictionalizing them I’m being more open, honest, and truthful; but really, at the end of the day, when all’s been done and ready to be retold, why bother?

The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis.  Just read the first couple of pages this morning and I’m already hooked.  “When he was young, people who were stupid, or crazy, were called stupid, or crazy.  But now (now that he was old) the stupid and the crazy were given special names for what ailed them.”  Mart and his smart-assed voice are back in form.  Over the years I took a lot of heat for my own smart-assed voice, which wasn’t exactly conducive to mainstream publication, so good for Mart, who hasn’t mellowed out with old age.  Not that I’ve mellowed…er, anyways, The Pregnant Widow won’t be available in the States until May.

The Great Shark Hunt by Hunter S. Thompson.  “The Temptation of Jean-Claude Kiley” is worth the price of admission alone, a dead-on merciless destruction of the supposed value of celebrity.  Should be required reading in every classroom during this age of celebrity global warming experts, celebrity economists, and celebrity presidents.

Buying a House in Italy by Gordon Neale.  A helpful assist for those of us currently on the Italian house hunting market.  My, how a global recession and a falling Euro suddenly makes my little dream casa very available.  Can’t wait to be back in Italy next month.  Hmm, I’ve come a long way since Munich…

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