Philip Caputo's Blog, page 14

ACTS OF FAITH

Gail Egan, U.K. producer of 20 films, including John LeCarre’s THE CONSTANT GARDNER, and independent producer Tracy Bing, have optioned the film rights to ACTS OF FAITH, which I consider my best novel. If it is ever brought to the screen — and believe me that’s a long shot — this story would have the epic scope and sweep of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. I say it’s a long shot because ACTS OF FAITH has been optioned a couple of times since its hardcover publication in 2005 — Ms. Bing was involved in the past, when she was with Warner Bros. Independent. Robert Rodat, who wrote the script for SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, had been attached as a screenwriter, but, alas, nothing came of it. This time around, I’m hoping that Ms. Bing’s steadfast belief in the book, and Ms. Egan’s enthusiasm for it, will make it a go.

I will add that the dreadful attack in Paris, where several friends and colleagues live, tempers my excitement. It almost feels morally wrong to feel any joy or pleasure at such a time. My thoughts and prayers are with the victims’ families, and — sorry to add this harsh note — one of my prayers is that the U.S. will join forces with France and whoever else is willing to sign on, to wipe the scourge of Islamist Radicalism (now incarnate in ISIS) from the face of the earth. Together, we crushed Naziism; together, we can crush this hideous political-religious ideology. There is a connection between these sentiments and the above announcement: ACTS OF FAITH’s underlying theme expresses the dangers of belief when it leads to fanaticism.

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Graybeard Warrior-Poets

“I wanted to create a virtual tour of duty,” said @PhilipCaputo as he kicks of audience Q&A. #BakerVietnam50

“Nothing can diminish the rightness of what you tried to do,” @PhilipCaputo reads from friend’s eulogy. #BakerVietnam50

06:32 PM – 09 Sep 15

Baker Institute

@BakerInstitute

Aug 27

9/9 at 5 p.m. #TheVietnamWar: 50 Years On. Speakers: Tim O’Brien, @PhilipCaputo, Larry Heinemann, & Tobias Wolff.

Four of us spoke at an event at Rice University in Houston earlier this month: Larry Heinemann, Tim O’Brien, Tobias Wolff, and I. We had been warriors who became writers, poets if you will of blood and fire. We’re in our 60s and 70s now, geriatric poets, our warrior days a long way behind us.

The event was sponsored by the Jones School of Business and the Baker Institute, a non-partisan think-tank started by former Secretary of State James Baker, a Houston native. The title of the two-day symposium/panel discussion was “Vietnam: 50 years On.” The 50 years refers to the beginning of America’s direct involvement in the Vietnam War in March, 1965 (though you could argue that a more accurate start date would be passage of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in August, 1964, after which U.S. combat planes began to bomb North Vietnam).

I can hardly believe it’s been half a century since my brigade, the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade, landed at Danang with our packs, rifles, and heads full of illusions that the war would be over in a few weeks or months, ending in, of course, triumph for our side.

My memories of my 16 months in the war are so vivid that the names of the rivers and villages, the routes of the trails, the numbers of the hills are still as familiar to me as the names and addresses in my address book and the way to my local post office. I know that, because when I returned to Vietnam in 1999, on assignment for National Geographic Adventure magazine, I was able to navigate the rice paddies and jungles southwest of Danang without aid of a map.

Fifty years is a long time in a human life, but a tick or two of the second hand in historical time. Fifty years is the span between Pearl Harbor and Desert Storm, yet the difference between those two conflicts makes the former seem as remote as Waterloo. I was born in the same year as Pearl Harbor. About Fifty years separated my birth (June 10, 1941) from the Battle of Wounded Knee in late December, 1890. A long time, and no time at all. When I drew my first breath, there must have been Lakota warriors and cavalrymen around the age I am now still living in America, with their memories of frontier fights in the Old West.

There is a point to this. As the infant me suckled on his mother’s breast and Japanese bombs rained down on Hawaii, I very much doubt that aging veterans of Wounded Knee or the Apache campaigns were giving lectures and readings at universities. (Way bigger fish to fry in 1941). And if they did, I doubt even more that they drew the crowd we did — a standing-room-only audience of 500 plus. One of the event’s organizers, an Iraq-Afghanistan veteran named Mike Freedman, told me that tickets sold out within 36 hours of its announcements — faster, he said, than when Nelson Mandela spoke at Rice.

This is not braggadocio. I wondered, as I listened to Heinemann, O’Brien, and Wolff read from their books about Vietnam, and as I read from mine, Why in the hell are all these people, most of whom were born well after the war’s end, listening to us? If the event were a one-off, maybe that question would not have occurred to me; however, to this day, I must receive half a dozen requests a year to take part in seminars on the war, to speak at high schools and colleges. I must also receive twice as many requests to blurb or review war books, even though I’ve written many that have nothing to do with the subject.

Why this perpetual fascination with a war waged half a century ago in a small Asian nation on the far side of the world?

Vietnam was not the bloodiest war we’d fought (362,000 killed and wounded, as compared with 1.2 million in WWII and 600,000 in the Civil War), but it was the longest at the time (since exceeded by Afghanistan) and the only one we have ever lost. There is something captivating about lost causes. That said, I think the reason for Vietnam’s magnetism is its centrality to one of the most tumultuous, divisive, and transformative eras in our history, the Sixties. I don’t define that era by its chronological bookends, 1960-1970, but by two bracketing events, the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963 and the Fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975.

This period was a kind of cultural and social earthquake that changed America radically, and the country continues to feel its aftershocks. The war divided the America as it had not been since the Civil War, and that initial split has since spiderwebbed, like the crack in a windshield.

Obviously, had there been no war, there would have been no anti-war movement. But, as Michael Herr noted in his great memoir, “Dispatches,” warrior and anti-warrior seemed like opposite poles of an electrical circuit, drawing energy from the same source. And they fed current into the civil rights movement, which, as it transited from the nonviolence of Martin Luther King to the Black Panthers, took on the coloration of an insurgency.

The Sixties were a revolutionary time in the fullest sense of the word — bombs, bullets, blood on the streets of Watts, Chicago, Detroit, as in the alleys and byways of Saigon and Hue. My memories of the war at home are as vivid as those I have of the war far away. I covered the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention riots for the Chicago Tribune.The following year, I reported on the window-smashing, head-bashing “Days of Rage” staged by the Weather Underground. I clearly remember lying under a police car with two Chicago cops in a shoot-out between them and a heavily-armed street gang in the Cabrini-Green projects on Chicago’s west side. A few weeks later, I had to rescue my sister, besieged in her apartment when the assassination of Martin Luther King set off riots that made the west side look like the Tet Offensive.

It is not historical coincidence that the modern feminist movement and even the environmental movement also got their starts during the Sixties, for the war had caused millions of Americans to question assumptions that had governed our society for decades. (The guy brings home the bacon, the girl stays home with the kids and greets him with a kiss and a martini. The environment: dam the rivers, cut down the forests, pollute the air, because there is a buck to be made). Authority was undermined, government came to be distrusted. (Today, ironically, that mistrust has been transferred from the left to the conservatives). But the lefties of forty and fifty years ago concluded that something was fundamentally wrong about a country that dumped napalm on a distant Asian nation of no threat to it, while sending its sons to fight and die there for reasons no one could explain. Other Americans pushed back against the Weathermen, the Black Panthers, and the peace marchers, condemning them as virtual traitors. You can hear strong echoes of that dispute in the present election campaign, not to mention the arguments over our current wars in the Middle East and in Afghanistan.

It was an exciting time and a frightening time. For me, that paradoxical mood of thrilling dread was captured in the Credence Clearwater song, “Bad Moon Rising.”

The Sixties, and the war raging at its heart, changed the country forever, in some ways for the better, in other ways for the worse. However you look at it, the country we live in today was born then.

John Hellman, an Ohio State professor, sums up that transformation in his 1986 book, “American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam.”

“Vietnam is an experience that has severely called into question American myth,” he writes. “Americans entered Vietnam with certain expectations that a story, a distinctly American story, would unfold. When the story of America in Vietnam turned into something unexpected, the true nature of the larger story of America itself became the subject of intense cultural dispute. On the deepest level, the legacy of Vietnam is the disruption of our story, of our explanation of the past and vision of the future.”

I could go on, but I’ll shut up now, leaving you to surmise what those expectations and that distinctly American story were.

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ANOTHER ESQUIRE REVIVAL

Check out: This week’s @EsquireClassics is @PhilipCaputo on Afghanistan. An old story that events have made new.

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CANCER AND THE COSMOS

Cancer refers to the disease, not the constellation, yet the disease is linked to the cosmos in my own mind.

A little more than a year ago, I underwent surgery for bladder cancer at White Plains hospital in White Plains, N.Y. A superficial but high-grade tumor roughly the size of a silver dollar was removed. A good-news, bad-news kind of thing. “High-grade” meant that it was an aggressive tumor, while “superficial” meant that it had not invaded the muscularis propria, the medical term for the bladder’s muscle wall. If it had, removal of the entire organ might have been necessary. Radical cystectomy, it’s called. Relieved that I would not have to spend the rest of what remains of my life pissing into a freezer bag belted to my waist, I then had six weeks of immunotherapy: the tuberculosis vaccine, Bacillus Calmette-Guerin, BCG for short, was injected into my bladder through a urinary catheter. BCG tricks the immune system into thinking it has been invaded by TB,thus mobilizing it for war against any attacker, including re-emergent cancer cells.

Because bladder cancers carry a high risk of relapse, check ups, called cystoscopies, are performed every three months for a year following surgery (and every six months to a year thereafter for five years). Once again, a catheter wriggles up the urinary tract, this time tipped by a tiny camera that projects images of your bladder onto a computer screen.

The four cystoscopies I’ve had so far have shown me to be cancer-free; but given the high rate of recurrence, it will be a while before I uncork the champagne.

To paraphrase what Samuel Johnson said about being sentenced to hang, being diagnosed with cancer tends to concentrate the mind wonderfully. Things that had seemed important become not so important; the supposedly great events of one’s times, the wars and crimes and follies of humankind, fade into a background hiss as you face the fact that your body, the body you have fed and bathed and exercised all your life, that has been your friend, has turned against you, and may do so again, its traitorous, malignant cells multiplying faster than horny rabbits. Your thoughts take on an eschatological bent as you contemplate the possibility, or probability, that you might die sooner than you’d expected. Let me note, tangentially, that I’d come to terms with my own death in Vietnam, at an age when it is common to think of oneself as immortal. However, though death by any other name is still death, there is a difference between confronting it as a young warrior on the battlefield, where it is swift, violent, and cloaked in the mantle of the heroic, and confronting it as an old man with a potentially terminal disease that might take months or years to finish you off. I do not fear death itself; but I do dread the process of dying. Still clear in my memory is the picture of an older cousin who died a decade ago after a courageous, 12-year struggle with a rare blood cancer: tubes in every orifice except his mouth, more tubes stuck in his veins, his mind half gone from drugs and morphine drips, thrashing and moaning on his hospital bed.

I’ve been led to ask questions that, before my diagnosis, I would have pooh-poohed as the sort that you might hear in a philosophy major’s dorm room at the University of Chicago. What is the meaning of life? Does my life have a purpose? Will its inevitable end be a passage into an after-life or into oblivion? These solitary interrogations inevitably lead to bigger questions: Does the human race exist for a reason, or are we all children of aimless evolutionary forces, strutting our hours upon the stage to no purpose whatsoever? Is there a God who imbues the universe with meaning, or is the universe, its vastness and marvelous complexity notwithstanding, merely a brute, mindless fact?

All right, I don’t spend every waking hour making these inquiries; and sometimes it seems futile to devote any time to them at all because they are probably unanswerable. But I do. It’s a kind of intellectual pilgrimage, a quest for evidence of the divine in nature. Yes, I’m aware that such evidence most likely doesn’t exist. I’m likewise aware that in seeking the divine, I’ve prejudiced the quest, implying that there is a God. In these ramblings, I’m not going to try to prove that He, She or It is real, but I do hope to convince anyone who reads this that believing in a Supreme Being is not irrational.

But why do I think that is important in the first place? Aside from my confrontation with cancer, I’ve been motivated by the “New Atheists” or “Militant Secularists” whose most celebrated champion is Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and author of “The God Delusion”. As that title indicates, Dawkins and company are waging an intellectual jihad against people of faith, portraying them as delusional dupes who believe in fairy tales, hocus-pocus, nonsense. Obviously, I don’t agree. It may seem impertinent for a journalist and mid-list novelist to question intellects as formidable as his, but in jumping the scientific reservation to become a polemicist, he and his cohorts have exposed themselves to enemy fire, as it were; so I feel justified in firing off a few rounds.

Steven Weinberg, physicist, Nobel laureate, and also New Atheist (albeit a far more considerate one than Dawkins) famously said in an interview with the New York Times: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” This aphorism has been quoted over and over in books and essays, on websites, and in a thousand conversations.

H.P. Lovecraft, the father of American science fiction, had an honest response to his perception of humanity’s place in a vast, indifferent cosmos. He regarded the cataclysm of the First World War as a triviality. “The celestial bodies perform their accustomed motions without regard to the state of war or peace upon this one tiny sphere,” he wrote. But if I read Weinberg right, he’s saying that the cosmos, this whole amazing contraption, trillions of stars, solar systems, galaxies, nebulae, and supernovae, is itself a kind of gargantuan Rube Goldberg device, whirling along to no end. That carries some profound philosophical implications. If you accept the premise that the part cannot be greater than the whole, it logically follows that if the whole (universe) is pointless, then so are its parts, which would include us. A bleak prospect, producing the existential angst probed by philosophers like Sartre and Camus, who thought that the problem of suicide is the only problem worth exploring. If one’s life, its triumphs often overcome by tragedies, its joys often diminished by suffering, lacks meaning, then why bother to get out of bed in the morning?

Weinberg touched on that issue a couple of years after the Times interview: “Though aware that there is nothing in the universe that suggests any purpose for humanity, one way that we can find a purpose is to study the universe by the methods of science, without consoling ourselves with fairy tales about its future, or about our own.”

I’m somewhat puzzled by that statement. If the universe has no point, why study it? And is Weinberg further saying that everyone who does not scientifically study it has no purpose? That would leave 99.99 percent of the human race groping, blindly and futilely, for a reason to live.

As for myself, I have enjoyed amateur astronomy for years. I’ve star-gazed under the pristine skies of the Southwest and the murkier, light-polluted heavens in the East. I love it when my monthly issue of “Sky and Telescope” arrives online and in the mail. My favorite part of the New York Times is “Science Times,” which runs every Tuesday. I’ve also collected a modest library of astronomy and cosmology books written for the layman.

Studying the universe, however, is a nature hobby, rather like bird watching. It is not my purpose in life; writing fiction and nonfiction is. Moreover, it is not a purpose I chose; it chose me, that is, it’s a vocation (to use an almost archaic term). To say that one is called to an endeavor is to imply that someone or something is doing the calling. I cannot prove, either through pure logic or the scientific method, that fate, destiny, or God summoned me to become a writer. I knew from a fairly early age that I wanted to be one; but in 1967 I came to the startling recognition that I had to be. When I started writing my first book, “A Rumor of War”, it was as though a power outside myself had directed me to pick up a pencil and begin. This power — you can give it, him or her any name you wish — spoke to me, as it were, telling me, “This is what you must do, this is what you were meant to do, this is why you’re here.”

I mention this experience to illustrate that the three I’s — imagination, intuition, and inspiration — can provide accurate road maps to truth. Scientific reasoning — the formulation of hypotheses that can be proven or disproven through experiment and observation– is critical to our understanding of the world, but it is not the only path to knowledge.

My intuition is that the universe burst into existence for a reason when the Big Bang banged 13.7 billion years ago. Intelligent life eventually also arose for a reason, or for many reasons. (One is to inquire why there is something rather nothing. Another is to conquer the demons and beasts in our hearts and reach for the better angels in our nature). Even absent a supernatural cause, the Big Bang strikes me as an almost miraculous event: a singularity, an unimaginably small, unimaginably dense particle or wave of quantum energy suddenly exploded into an unimaginably hot fireball that expanded at many times the speed of light, and in time (about 380,000 years) cooled sufficiently to begin forming the stuff that the stars and we are made of. I don’t think that this moment, Time Zero, was an accident. Probably because I’m a novelist, I like to think of the singularity as an idea in the mind of a Creator, one that He or It wanted to express. The Big Bang was its expression, and it continues to evolve and will until, well, God knows when.

For all that, I am not at ease with the God of scripture, the interventionist God who performs miracles and who is all-perfect, all-benevolent, and answers prayers; nor am I at ease with the God of the 18th-century Deists, who proposed that God got the whole thing going and then retired. I am more at ease with the God of the ancient Stoic philosophers, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus, in whose cosmology It-He-She is the “divine intelligence of the universe.” This Being is the author of the fixed laws that govern the cosmos, and remains active and involved through their workings. It strains my credulity to suppose that gravity, electromagnetism, and the other forces of nature operate the way they do just because.(I’ll tell you why in a moment).

To use an imperfect analogy, the Higgs Boson, recently discovered by physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, bestows mass on subatomic particles like electrons and protons. Without it, they would not be. For that reason, it’s been whimsically called “the God particle.” I think of God as the particle that imparts meaning to the entire universe. Without it, this whole shebang would be as pointless as Weinberg thinks it is, leaving us with no task but to figure out how to go on living in the midst of an unfathomable absurdity.

I came to this conclusion partly through reading and thinking about the world we live in, and partly by reflecting on a semi-mystical experience I had a few years ago, as I scanned the skies through astronomical binoculars on the high desert in Arizona. I saw the Andromeda Galaxy, 2.5 million light years away. The light striking my eyes had begun its journey to earth not long after our Australopithecine ancestors started to walk upright; yet the Andromeda Galaxy is a neighbor by cosmic standards. Some galaxies are so distant that it’s taken 12 billion years for their light to reach us! I felt overcome by such an immensity of time and space, wonder-struck, awed, and humbled almost to the point of humiliation. What was I? A short-lived microbe on the skin of a small planet orbiting a mid-size star in an average solar system in an ordinary galaxy that IS merely one of billions. And yet I was also a microbe with a consciousness capable of comprehending what a light year or a galaxy or a solar system was. I perceived a divine order to things. My mind seemed to soar outward and expand and unite with a universal mind, infinitely greater than I. In a heightened state of awareness, aware of being aware, I saw that despite my insignificance, I was part of creation, which made me feel grateful and exalted even as I was humbled.

Now, back to the question, Can one affirm the proposition, God exists, reasonably and without being considered a tent-revival holy-roller who thinks the Earth is only 6,000 years old? A cretin taken in by fables? Certainly a lot of non-cretins have believed in a Creator: the Islamic astronomer Averroes; the Jewish historian Josephus; Dante, Milton, Hayden, to name five out of a list containing thousands. Closer to our own day, Georges Lemaitre, considered father of the Big Bang Theory, was a Jesuit priest. And Francis Collins, prominent geneticist, leader of the human genome project, has said that he sees “the hands of a Creator” in setting the parameters that rule material existence.

Collins was referring to the “Anthropic Principle,” which posits that the fundamental forces in nature, the nuclear, the weak, the gravitational, the electromagnetic, and the mysterious force called “dark energy,” have been “fine-tuned” to permit life to exist. For example, if the nuclear, which binds electrons and protons to the nucleus of atoms, were just slightly stronger than it is, the universe would consist of nothing more than random particles of helium. If it were weaker, then atoms could not hold together, and the universe would be a mass of radiation. No stars, no planets with plants and animals, and no us. Likewise for gravity, electromagnetism, and dark energy. If the values for those were just a little greater or smaller than they were at the beginning, the universe either would have been still-born, collapsing in on itself, or would have expanded so rapidly that no large bodies would have had a chance to form; again, life would not have been possible. Mathematicians have calculated that it is extremely improbable – one chance in several billions – that this should be so. Yet it is.

Theologians, philosophers, and scientists like Collins have deployed the Anthropic Principle as an argument for the existence of God. If you claim that the universe has been fine-tuned against incredible odds, you’re strongly suggesting that there is a fine-tuner, meaning that the universe is the result of intelligent design. That makes sense to me. If there is a preponderance of circumstantial evidence for design, and if we apply the principle of Occam’s Razor (among competing hypotheses, the simplest is probably true), maybe there is a designer. Or: If it walks, quacks, and flies like a duck, most likely it’s a duck.

In “The Accidental Universe”, Alan Lightman dryly notes, “Intelligent design…is an answer to fine tuning that does not appeal to most scientists.” The explanation that does appeal is the Multiverse, a theory parented by two others, String Theory and Eternal Inflation (both of which are very, very difficult for non-physicists to understand. In fact, there some physicists who don’t quite get them). The Multiverse idea proposes that there have been, and continue to be, zillions of “Big Bangs,” each spawning a universe. The process has gone on from eternity, and will go on forever. Thus, our universe is only one of countless others, each with different properties. One universe, for example, might have a nuclear force many times stronger than ours; another might have a gravitational force significantly weaker. Some of these alternate universes will be huge blobs of lifeless plasma, some will be dead seas of subatomic particles, but some, like ours, will be congenial to life, including intelligent life.

How many other universes does the theory predict? 10 to the 500th power. That is 10 followed by 500 zeroes, a number for which we haven’t got a name (the largest named number is the googol: 10 to the 100th power). It is also a number that’s incomprehensible, infinite for all practical purposes, which poses a problem: Maybe the universe is incalculable, and we’ll never fully understand it. There are additional difficulties with the Multiverse that have led some physicists to question whether it is science or philosophical conjecture. Problem 1: There is very little physical evidence to support the validity of its father and mother, Eternal Inflation and String Theory. Problem 2: String Theory requires the existence of seven spatial dimensions beyond the three we’re familiar with.

Let’s go back to the scientific world’s antipathy to the design argument. Why its lack of appeal? It’s a dead end for scientists, who are in the business of describing and explaining reality through the study of natural phenomena. A designer, a creator, a supreme being, is supernatural, outside matter and energy, and so cannot be investigated, measured, observed, tested. The Multiverse, with its grounding in mathematically-based theories, promises a natural explanation for fine-tuning. But is it a false promise? Our universe’s multitudinous ancestors and siblings and children, if they exist, dwell in 5th, 6th, 10th dimensions, which also lie outside our ability to investigate, measure, observe, or test.

Lightman succinctly sums up the conundrum. The Multiverse, he writes, requires us to “believe in the existence of many other universes. But we have no conceivable way of observing these other universes and cannot prove their existence. Thus, to explain what we see in the world…we must believe in what we cannot prove…Sound familiar? Theologians are accustomed to taking some beliefs on faith, scientists are not.”

My own view of the Multiverse is that it is a scientist’s version of Genesis, rational if unprovable. But I submit that believing in a grand designer, also unprovable, is no less rational. If I live long enough to see the invention of some astonishing instrument or method that actually shows even one of the 10 to the 500th other possible universes, I’ll change my mind.

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Horn of Africa film option

I signed today, April 11, 2015, a film option with Stephen Altman and David Levy for my first novel, Horn of Africa., published in 1980. This novel has a long history in Hollywood (which I use as a generic term for the movie industry). It was optioned by Michael Douglas’s production company for six years back in the late 80s to early 90s, and was an “almost” with Paramount Productions years ago. Almost, of course, counts only in horseshoes and hand grenades.Hoping for a bullseye this time around. For the uninitiated, an option only means that the Purchaser, in this case Altman and Levy, holds the rights to a book for a certain period of time, during which they will attempt to bring it to the screen by signing up a director, a lead actor, a studio, a screenwriter, or all four. The journey from option to finished film is thus long and fraught with obstacles.

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New York Times Book Review

Take a look at my review of “The Sympathizer,” to run on the front page of the New York Times Book Review on Sunday, April 5. This is a novel well worth its price — and your time. /2015/04/05/books/review/the-sympathizer-by-viet-thanh-nguyen.html

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TUCSON EVENT II

Will be speaking on a panel at the Tucson Festival of Books this weekend, and also appearing with other writers at an iconic Tucson venue, The Mountain Oyster Club. Link to interview with me by the University of Arizona newspaper.http://www.wildcat.arizona.edu/articl...

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CAGE THE CHEETAH IV

Letter from Author’s United to all 10 board members of Amazon. http://authorsunited.net/. Writer or reader, READ IT!

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CAGE THE CHEETAH 3

NYT story: PLOT THICKENS AS 900 WRITERS BATTLE AMAZON: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/08/bus....

I am among the 909 authors who signed the open letter, composed by Douglas Preston, asking his readers to tell Amazon to stop using writers as hostages in negotiations with Hachette. As visitors to this site know, I have called on Amazon customers to boycott the online retailing giant, because quite a lot is at stake in Amazon’s contract dispute with Hachette, a traditional publishing company.

The Times states that Amazon seeks dominate the publishing industry. Actually, it’s trying to monopolize it in all its aspects. In the ideal Amazon future, it will be the major, if not the only, book publisher in America; it will be the major, if not the only, bookseller in America; and it will be the major, if not the only manufacturer of e-readers in America, and all of America will be reading nothing but e-books. (This doesn’t count the Tech giant’s ventures in selling just about everything else, from athletic shoes to gardening equipment to computers, CDs, and now, its own smart phones). Jeff Bezos, the company’s CEO, seems to be a 21st century striver for the John D. Rockefeller Monopoly Award.

Why is this dangerous?

1. Count on it — if Amazon ever does become the only dog on the block, prices of books, downloads, and e-readers will rise. Monopolies benefit no one except the monopolist and his/her cronies. That’s why the U.S. passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act 120 years ago; that’s why the (Theodore) Roosevelt administration and the Progressive Movement battled Standard Oil and other corporate combines in the early 20th century.

2. Conventional book publishers, as well as booksellers (especially independents) have been and are far more than businesses; they are cultural institutions, integral to the whole humanist tradition going back to the early Renaissance. Publishers like Hachette find and nurture new authors, they develop talent and bring it to the world. They support established writers through personal relations between the writer and his or her editors, while bookstores like Powell’s in Portland, OR.,  the Tattered Cover in Denver, CO, Lemuria in Jackson, MS, and Books and Books in Coral Gables, FL (among many others) maintain sales staffs deeply versed in literature who hand-sell noteworthy books to their customers. This is the kind of hands-on, face-to-face, mind-to-mind relationship that cannot exist in the online world. Both the publishers of books and the sellers of them enrich our culture and society, which would be vastly poorer without them.

3. Bezos and executives seems to think otherwise. To them, the book publisher and the bookstore are dinosaurs whose inevitable demise should be hastened by the tech wizards like themselves. Or maybe I should say “wounded gazelle” instead of dinosaur. Bezos famously said that Amazon should go after publishers as a cheetah would a wounded gazelle. It’s too bad, because Amazon has done a lot for book writers and book buyers in the 20 years of its existence. It has done a lot even for traditional publishers, by forcing them to modernize through competition. But by blocking sales of books by Hachette writers like Preston, by steering customers to other books as a way of pressuring Hachette, Amazon is doing a dis-service to its customers and to writers,  using them as human shields in its legal battle.

To see a  copy of the letter and the roster of signatories that will appear in Sunday’s (Aug. 10) editions of the Times go to:http://www.authorsunited.net/

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CAGE THE CHEETAH 2

 

Here is another take on the Amazon cheetah’s pursuit of the wounded gazelle, Hachette. Much of what Wolff has to say is true, though I think his criticisms of traditional publishers is a little too harsh. The publishing industry has never been as efficient and as fast on its feet as, say, manufacturing electronics, because it’s never been, never will be, purely an industry. A book publishing firm is a business, but, like an opera company, an art galley, or a symphony orchestra, it’s also a cultural institution. Publishers are not, by nature or inclination, businesspeople as astute or ruthless as a Jeff Bezos. Yes, as Wolff points out, they make a lot of money putting out junk like Fifty Shades of Gray, but those earnings help to support more serious writers, as well as the discovery and development of new literary talent. At any rate, books are not commodities, like the other stuff Amazon sells, from T-shirts to sneakers to flat screen TVS.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/columnist/wolff/2014/06/01/the-battle-between-hachette-and-amazon/9761817/

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