iTunes Question Meme

Which I picked up from the excellent cartoonist Rene Engstrom (pretend there's an umlaut over that "o") --

1. Put your iTunes (or any other media player you may have) on shuffle.
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer.
3. YOU MUST WRITE THAT SONG NAME DOWN NO MATTER HOW SILLY IT SOUNDS!

(I've put an equally-randomly chosen alternative in brackets underneath, though, when the first choice is just a non sequitur.)

IF SOMEONE SAYS "IS THIS OKAY" YOU SAY?
Without a Trace by Soul Asylum

WHAT WOULD BEST DESCRIBE YOUR PERSONALITY?
El Condor Pasa (If I Could) by Simon & Garfunkel
[Leave My Kitten Alone by Elvis Costello]

WHAT DO YOU LIKE IN A GUY/GIRL?
All Lovers Are Deranged by David Gilmour

WHAT IS YOUR LIFE'S PURPOSE?
In the Way by Magnapop

WHAT IS YOUR MOTTO?
I Wish I Could've Been There by Biirdie

WHAT DO YOUR FRIENDS THINK OF YOU?
Meetings With Remarkable Men (Show Me the Hero) by Harvey Danger

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT VERY OFTEN?
The Dress by Blonde Redhead
[Fucking Up by Cracker]

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR BEST FRIEND?
I'm Free by the Rolling Stones
[How Long Have You Been Stoned by Over the Rhine]

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE PERSON YOU LIKE?
Counting Sheep by the Judybats
[Please Call Me, Baby by Tom Waits]

WHAT IS YOUR LIFE STORY?
It'll Be Me (Live) by Richard & Linda Thompson
[No One Mourns the Wicked from the soundtrack to Wicked]

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP?
The Shadow of the Past from the soundtrack to The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
[Jellypop Perky Jean by Julian Cope]

WHAT DO YOU THINK WHEN YOU SEE THE PERSON YOU LIKE?
Great Beyond by Aimee Mann

WHAT DO YOUR PARENTS THINK OF YOU?
Untitled by Bauhaus
[Cherry Bomb by the Runaways]

WHAT WILL YOU DANCE TO AT YOUR WEDDING?
Tryin' by the Eagles

WHAT WILL THEY PLAY AT YOUR FUNERAL?
Long Tall Sally by the Beatles

WHAT IS YOUR HOBBY/INTEREST?
Dead or Alive by Oingo Boingo
[The Court of the Crimson King by King Crimson]

WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST SECRET?
Rainbirds by Tom Waits
[South Carolina by John Linnell]

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR FRIENDS?
The Incredits from the soundtrack to The Incredibles
[Good Ones by KaiserCartel]

WHAT'S THE WORST THING THAT COULD HAPPEN?
The Body Says No by the New Pornographers

HOW WILL YOU DIE?
The Midnight Knock by the Autumns

WHAT IS THE ONE THING YOU REGRET?
Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun by Pink Floyd

WHAT MAKES YOU LAUGH?
Halcyon Days by Local H

WHAT MAKES YOU CRY?
Closing Theme by Camper Van Beethoven
[23 Mile Ride by Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper]

WILL YOU EVER GET MARRIED?
That's All Lies by Jet

WHAT SCARES YOU THE MOST?
(I Wish I'd Killed) John Wayne by Guadalcanal Diary

DOES ANYONE LIKE YOU?
She Bop by Cyndi Lauper

IF YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME, WHAT WOULD YOU CHANGE?
In Your Hands by the Mendoza Line
[I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor by the Arctic Monkeys]

WHAT HURTS RIGHT NOW?
Everything You Did by Steely Dan

And, just because I like playing with widgets, here's an Amazon widget of as many of the "official" songs as were available:

Neil Gaiman Recommends Books on BN.com

BN.com has gotten a whole bunch of famous writer-type people -- Charlaine Harris, Stephen King, Chuck Klosterman, Greogry Maguire, William Gibson, and a dozen or so more -- to each recommend three books.

Gaiman is first, at least for the moment, so he gets the headline (as he got the headline in the e-mail BN.com sent me yesterday).

Here's the BN.com page with all of the picks -- each writer also contributed a sentence or three about why he or she loved each particular book -- to aid you in the "buy a book" campaign this season.

(And I don't even get a kickback from BN.com, unlike some other online bookstore I could mention, but won't. BN.com sold one of my books really really well last week, for no obvious reason I can see, so I'm feeling very kindly towards them right now.)

What are the books? Click over there to find out...

Eisner Award: Call for Entries!

I've never mentioned this in past years, but I'm a judge now, so I'll put on my little judgely hat to say...

OYEZ! OYEZ! The Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards for 2009 are now accepting submissions! Read the press release! See the informative PDF! Submit works that you published or worked on!

The Divorce Calculator!

Since I am compelled to try these things, I had to click when the Freakonomics blog linked to the Divorce Calculator:

People with similar backgrounds who are already divorced: 18%

People with similar backgrounds who will be divorced over the next five years: 8%

* In general for the five-year divorce prediction rates, those with less than 3 percent are at lower
risk, 3 - 7 percent are of average risk and more than 7 percent are at higher risk.

Whew!

A Merry Christmas for Book Publishing

Random House: Irwyn Applebaum and Steve Rubin are out. (I wonder if Applebaum's brother, Random spokesman Stuart Applebaum, had to put together the announcement?) There are reports of a companywide meeting going on today, where many expect word of larger cuts.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: VP/Publisher Becky Saletan resigns after the "freeze" foofaraw.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt II: Electric Boogaloo: Beloved editor Ann Patty and "a lot" of other HMH folks are fired.

Nelson: CEO Michael Hyatt lets the world know he's just laid off 54 people via Twitter.

Simon & Schuster: S&S Childrens' President Rick Richter is "leaving the company."

Have I missed anything? Harper and Penguin haven't started the bloodletting yet, have they? How about Macmillan?

Update:

S&S II: The Embiggening: 35 job cuts (on top of Richter).

Note that the RH restructuring, HMH cuts, and the S&S cuts all happened today. Anybody else have an all-hands meeting called suddenly?

Update II (4 December, AM):
A New York Times story datelined yesterday adds the following bits of news:

Penguin: there's a salary freeze in place. (More details in a story from The Bookseller -- not that Penguin wasn't famous for low pay to begin with.)

HarperCollins: delay on raises

Random House: no layoffs yet, though they're clearly coming

Macmillan: mentions John Sargent's remarks last month in a company wide meeting that layoffs may be coming

Random House again: a minor point, but it's been reported a couple of places (such as this Observer article) that Carol Schneider has been the public face of the Random restructuring because corporate spokesman Stuart Applebaum "is excising himself [from being the media contact on this issue] because the dissolution of the Bantam Dell division involves the departure of his brother and longtime colleague Irwyn."

Wizards of the Coast: an unspecified number of layoffs, including at least one VP

Devil's Due (a smaller comics publisher) has also laid off two people.

And PW's "The Beat" reports that Tokyopop has laid off seven employees in LA, including one editor.

On the bright side, remember that Hachette (buoyed by Stephenie Meyer, James Patterson, and distribution of The Shack) is giving all of its employees an extra bonus this year and that Wiley is taking over Meredith's drooping (but still filled with well-known, powerful brands) book publishing program.

Any wonder, though, that the business is already calling yesterday "Black Wednesday?"

Update III (noon on Dec. 4):
With additional links, mostly from today's Publishers Lunch.

HarperCollins: all raises deferred until after July 1, 2009, and they're leaving open the question of layoffs.

(Though note that story, from Bloomberg, says that Random is going from five divisions to three -- which is true only if you ignore Random House Books for Young Readers. I believe the smaller "groups" -- like Audio Publishing and Information -- actually report in to one or another of the new "big three," but don't place money on it.)

Publishers Lunch also reported that Bowker has eliminated thirteen jobs in the US, mostly because those jobs have moved to the Netherlands.

I'm only keeping track of book publishing here; there are also big newspaper cuts and at least some magazine jobs being lost as well.

Update IV:
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: large layoffs in the Orlando office -- rumor is on the order of 200. Possibly other layoffs in other HMH locations, too. PW reports that eight people were laid off from the trade division in NYC; the larger layoffs are part of a bloodbath restructuring of the heavily indebted company's large K-12 operation.

Update V:
Just learned, via this post from Keith R.A. DeCandido, that one of the folks laid off from S&S was editor Marco Palmieri. All best wishes for a short, successful job search to him and the rest of the people suddenly office-less this week.

People Who Think They Know Much More Than They Actually Do

If this had been an Onion story --sadly, it's not; it's from the Observer -- the headline would have read something like "Ex-Editorial Assistant Explains All of Publishing: Makes Plans for World Domination from Indian Hedge Fund."

The best part? This quote:

Such observations were above Mr. Wolff’s pay-grade, however, and when he tried to raise them with Hachette’s CEO, David Young, he was not encouraged.

"Not encouraged!" David Young is a better sport than most CEOs if his response to a brand-new entry-level drone trying to tell him how to completely change his business was to "not encourage" that kid. I'd "not encourage" him with the toe of my boot.

And I came to this from a link from the New Yorker's book blog that called Wolff a "Hachette insider." No, dear New Yorker, an ex-editorial assistant who worked at a company for perhaps a year is not "an insider."

Todd Allen on Comics Economics

This is the kind of post I love -- I like to do them myself, when I can, and I like them even more when someone else does the work for me.

Todd Allen, writing for Publishers Weekly, has examined the costs and rewards of independent comics publishing, and come up with a sanguine picture. For 99% of us, the numbers will be purely academic -- but they're interesting all the same, and seeing Allen work them out is instructive.

Today's Big Wiley News

As the head of our division announced at Sales Meeting this morning, Wiley has made a deal with Meredith to license their brands into books, and to distribute their existing books, as of March 1st, 2009.

Some publishers whine about the economy and make confusing announcements about "freezes;" some make plans and move forward. I'm thrilled to be working for one of the latter.

Overstatement of the Day

From Persona Non Data, who is generally interesting but much too given to the overly sweeping statement:

Increasingly all of us - not just those of us who have been checking our bank account and buying airline tickets online for years - will be buying everything online, at the best combination of pricing and free delivery, and all without dealing with the expense and hassle of traveling.

Oh, really? Even those of us who neither live in doorman buildings on the Upper West Side nor have someone staying home all day to accept packages?

Some things are scalable, some things are not. The majority of retail purchases will continue to be made in person -- whether or not they're made in "big box" stores (the dominance of which is a very recent development).

I'm old enough to remember when catalog retailing was going to kill the department store -- and I bet "Persona" is, as well.

I Was Told There'd Be Cake by Sloan Crosley

Sloane Crosley is a pretty young woman who grew up moderately smart, upper-middle-class, and suburban. She seems to be nice enough, but very little has happened to her, and she hasn't thought about any of it all that much, either.

I Was Told There'd Be Cake is Crosley's first book, a collection of somewhat humorous, somewhat memoirish essays collected from a variety of sources. It's not all the way over to humor, though you might find it in that section of your book store. (Mostly because the chains don't really have a "tasteful essays" section." And the memoir aspect doesn't extend all that far -- Crosley keeps the audience at a distance from her real emotional life, and most of the surface details of that life as well.

Crosley is a pleasant writer, but, from the evidence here, not enough has happened to her to warrant writing about it. She either needs to do more or to think more; writing surface-y thoughts about bland, common events is cute for a short while, but it's nothing to build a career on. (Then again, Crosley has a real day-job career as a publicist, so she may be content to keep writing this sort of thing.)

I picked up I Was Told There Would Be Cake at the library mostly because Gawker spent the summer picking on Crosley -- mostly for being pretty and well-connected, which are not reasonable things to complain about. (That her essays are a bit dull and obvious, though -- that's fair game.) As usual, malicious gossip and underhand attacks only raise the profile of the person being attacked -- I, and probably thousands of others, only read Crosley's book because of Gawker.

On the other hand, if we all have a similar reaction -- sure, she's cute and well-connected, but so what? -- the outlook for Crosley's second book are not as good.

Amazon's Gift Ideas

So Amazon sent me another e-mail -- they're so thoughtful that way, never forgetting to write like some people I could mention -- with a list of gift suggestions. Now, most people make up a list of gifts either as a wish list -- for themselves -- or as suggestions of nice things you could buy the people you already know. But Amazon is a bit different: they don't want gifts themselves, selfless folks that they are; they just want you to buy things from them.

They sent me a list of ten items, and I won't list them all here. But I will share with you some of the more interesting things Amazon thinks would make good gifts this year:

for your loutish nephew, how about...


for your aunt who's tired of Riverdance and Celtic Woman, and is just looking for another vaguely classical, nonthreatening musical hunk of schmaltz to swoon over for the next year...


for that special, caffeine-crazed loner we all know...


for anyone who needs the message, "No offense, but your teeth really stink"....


and, lastly, for the child you desperately hope will support you in your old age with what you're sure are dazzling musical skills...

Weird Spam

We all get spam, and some of it is more coherent than others. I've gotten plenty of Russian spam over the past couple of years, along with the pieces that make you wonder if their senders are from this planet to begin with.

But, until today, I never got a piece of spam like this -- a single picture, with text in a language I don't read, which seems to be an ad for some shop, somewhere.

My best guess is that the language is Turkish, and the shop sells perfume, but I could be quite wrong. Why any such business would think it could do well by sending out random messages to the world, I don't know.

But here it is: it's professional-looking, for spam, so I grudgingly appreciate it, even as I completely fail to understand it. (I've even tried running it through Babelfish and some competitors, with no luck.)

William Gibson Dead at 94 (No, The Other One)

Reuters has the obituary.

I don't have any good excuse for posting this, except to possibly get out in front of the expected wave of misinformation, or because I myself used to wonder if the authors of The Miracle Worker and Count Zero were the same person.

As it turns out, they weren't, and now only the formerly SFnal William Gibson is still with us.

Cop Speak by Tom Philbin

The passing of time can be cruel to books -- and sometimes even to the ones that you don't expect to be touched. Cop Speak is a lexicon of law enforcement and criminal language originally published in 1996 -- that's only twelve years, so things can't have changed that much, right?

But the last dozen years have seen the continued flood of cop shows on TV, from reality shows like Cops (already nearly a decade old when Cop Speak was published) to CSI, Law & Order and all of their derivatives. And those shows all turn their watchers into experts --as far as those watchers know, at least -- in the minutiae of police procedure and criminal behavior.

That's minor, though, compared to the effect of the Internet. We don't have to know more about everyone else now, but we can find out nearly anything about nearly any subculture or group. So when Cop Speak's author, Tom Philbin, comes out with a Sgt. Friday-esque definition like "Cross-dressing is not illegal, but police make themselves aware of it as part of the profile of a given individual because it may impact on an investigation in some way," (defining transvestite, of course) the reader mostly wonders how many PDs still bother to do anything like that. Philbin has a lot of similar side comments about police keeping track of "abnormal" people -- but, these days, we're less likely to buy into the implicit assumption that those people are a tiny, easily delineated minority.

Cop Speak is mostly about those standard police and criminal terms -- cuff, bounty hunter, horse, grilled, Mafia, stiff, and so on. And most of us already know, at least vaguely, what most of these terms mean. (Philbin does have impressive lists of street terms for various drugs, though, and I'm sure we'll all learn something there.) Philbin defines them all pretty well -- sometimes flatly, but usually in that pseudo-tough-guy voice -- and some of them (like "death fart") are things I hadn't heard of. But you'd need to be pretty innocent of the world of cops and criminals to find Cop Speak particularly eye-opening.

So Cop Speak, despite not being all that old, still feels like a time capsule. It's a book that could have been published, in virtually the same form, in 1966, or '76, or '86. But the last decade -- even though it hasn't made that huge a difference in the way police do their jobs -- has made a difference in what we know, about each other and about the cops and criminals of the world. If you're interested enough to want to read Cop Speak, there's not much it could teach you.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 11/29

This week saw the first package addressed to me specifically as an Eisner judge -- at work, since people in the publishing business tend to know (or be able to find out) where other companies are. And, as always, I'm happy about that -- there may be a point, some day, when there are more books than I can handle, but I've never hit that level yet.

So: every week I post a list like this, of books that came in for review (or whatever else, when I'm doing something else -- such as being an Eisner judge). I do this because I like books and want to celebrate and write about books, even when I know I won't manage to actually read all of them. This list, then, is made of what I think about books as soon as I see them, as idiosyncratic and odd as those thoughts may be.

There's probably some theory that you need to hear about a consumer product X number of times before you finally pick it up (let alone buy it), but I don't know what that secret number is. I do know that I've been hearing about Lucy Knisley's French Milk for a while, from a variety of places, and that I can't remember exactly when or where any of them were. But French Milk is now in my hands, so I can tell you that it's the graphic story -- told through photographs and drawings, mostly sketchbook style rather than arranged into comics panels -- of Knisley's six-week trip to Paris with her mother in early 2007. It was published by Simon & Schuster's Touchstone imprint, in trade paperback, in October.

I've read a couple of Jeffrey Brown's previous graphic memoirs -- as I recall, Unlikely and Clumsy -- and also his quirky piss-take on his own childhood obsessions, Incredible Change-Bots. But, as far as I can see, I've never written about any of them here. I haven't seen his autobiographical work for a few years, so he may have worked out the aggressively primitivist style he had -- it wasn't just art, but also the way he told the story, almost like a kid going "and then I...and then I...." Anyway, I've got another chance to look at his work with his new collection Little Things, which is also from Touchstone and was published in April.

Ariel Schrag wrote and drew full-length -- the first, shortest one is forty-nine pages! -- autobiographical graphic novels about her high school years, one during each summer after that year. She then printed those books up and sold them around her school, to the very people she wrote about. Some of those books have been available to the general public since then -- Schrag apparently graduated in 1998 -- but Touchstone (yes, them again) is in the process of reprinting all four books. The first two, shorter GNs were reprinted in an oversized trade paperback in April as Awkward and Definition and the second, Potential, came out in May. (The fourth, Likewise, is scheduled for next spring.)

I got my monthly big package of book from Yen Press as well this week. Since they're all later books in series, and all publishing in trade paperback (of various sizes) in December, I'll stick them into a bulleted list:

• Kaze No Hana, Vol. 3 from Ushio Mizta and Akiyoshi Ohta -- contemporary saving-the-world fantasy, with complicated family dynamics, magic swords, and the usual slavering monsters. I reviewed both Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 for ComicMix.
• Judith Park is an object lesson in the international language of comics: she lives in Germany, has Korean ancestry, but makes her comics originally for the Japanese market (and now we're reading them in the US). I'd thought her book Y Square (which I reviewed for ComicMix) was the first in a numbered series, but apparently not -- the sequel is here, and it's titled like a novel: Y Square Plus. The first was a light romance story, with some homoerotic undertones; this second book supposedly pairs up the other boy from the first book.
• I haven't been reading Shin JiSang and Geo's manwha series Chocolat, which has just hit its seventh volume, but I understand that it's another romance-y teenage comic, focused on the world of boy bands and their fan clubs.
• Legend is a fantasy story that's just now hit its fourth volume, and I read (and was confused by) the second volume. That's about all I know.
• Another series I don't know much about is One Thousand and One Nights, by Han SeungHee and Jeon JinSeok. I have the sixth volume of it here, and, despite the Arabian title, it seems to be set in classical Athens. (I use my vast ratiocinative skills to deduce that from characters named Socrates, Alcibiades, and Critias.)
• And then there's Antique Gift Shop, another sixth volume. This one's from Lee Eun, and I can't quite figure out what it's about.

Also from Yen, also in December, also trade paperback -- but in color and by a guy with an American-sounding name ("Jason T. Kruse"), The World of Quest, Vol. 2 is different enough for me to break it out of the bulleted list, just to see if you're paying attention. It's an all-ages story about the spoiled Prince Nestor -- actually, he may be more of just a little thoughtless jerk than actively spoiled -- and his protector, the mightily-thewed (and weirdly superhero-costumed) Quest. I missed the first book, which presumably explained all of this -- I expect there are six-year-olds who have the whole thing down pat, but I'm lost.

And then we dive right back into the bullets, since Norton sent me four books by Will Eisner -- all are just published in paperback, and three of the four of which I reviewed when they appeared in the Norton hardcover omnibus Life, in Pictures last year (all but the last):

• To the Heart of the Storm, the semi-autobiographical story of a soldier much like Eisner, traveling south for basic training in 1942 and remembering his life so far
• The Name of the Game, a multi-generational saga about a family much like that of Eisner's wife Ann, reaching, again, just up to WWII
• The Dreamer, one of Eisner's best-known stories, another thinly fictionalized look at the years before WWII, this time focusing on his early comics career
• and, last, the new The Will Eisner Reader, collecting seven of his best stories for new readers to get a sense of what Eisner did and who he was.

And last this week is Nina Matsumoto's Yokaiden, Vol. 1. It's manga-style, but originated in the West; Matsumoto has been a webcomic creator (Saturnalia) and a fan artist (this famous Simpsons-as-manga-characters piece was widely linked a while back). Yokaiden seems to be her first work created for book form, and tells the story of a Japanese boy, Hamachi, and his adventures with the folkloric yokai spirits. Del Rey published it on November 18th.