“… nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.”

            —James Baldwin

And nothing is more imponderable, once we sense it, than eternity.

As a child learning about the universe, I gripped my mother’s arm and said, “Forever never stops!”

Our lives are finite, but life is infinite.

A popular way to resolve this tension is to create false “end times,” when the world as we know it will “come to an end” — and “forever” will stop. The latest of these fads is 2012, but other “ends of the world” have included 30 C.E., 1000, 1843, 1844, 1914, 1919 and 2000.

Since these promises of apocalypse have yet to be fulfilled (and I personally wouldn’t hold my breath) the next best way to “kill eternity” is through fad and fashion: “THIS style,” people declare, “Is over.”

Modernism is “over; “ even post-modernism is “over.”

Yet, people pay huge sums of money to acquire art of the modernist era, and students continue to read and love modernist literature.

When Apple introduced its first model in the mid 1980s, the artsy hoi polloi cried: “Painting is dead!”

Yet everyone I know either owns an original painting or a poster reproduction of one.

In the early 2000s the music industry arguably transformed. But still, my teenage nephews love the Beatles as I did.

The latest death cry has come from our own industry, publishing.

A pretentious ex of mine declared: “Soon every book will be an executable file!”

Two weeks later, I attended Book Expo and saw miles of paper books displayed.

Last week, best-selling author Seth Godin wrote in The Wall Street Journal about his plans to produce and market books directly for his readers. And yesterday, the New York Times weighed in on the presumed battle between ebooks and paper books.

To me, such avowals don’t foretell the end of paper books and traditional publishing so much as the introduction of choice and simultaneity.

Perhaps my prognosis is less dramatic than “Book Publishing Apocalypse Now.”

In the blog posts that follow I will explore the more subtle and perhaps likely implications of these changes in our industry.

 “Perhaps every generation feels that it is standing at a watershed of history, but our current problems seem particularly challenging.”
  — Karen Armstrong, A Compassionate Life in 12 Steps

Religious historian Karen Armstrong has identified a key task of our times: to build a global community based on compassion.

Armstrong has done more than identify this task. She has invited us all to help her implement it. In February 2008 she won the TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) Prize and asked TED to help her create a Charter for Compassion. 

The Charter’s goal is to restore compassion and The Golden Rule to the heart of religion and morality. No small mission!

“Before you think of changing your world, you have to turn your attention to yourself.”— Karen Armstrong, A Compassionate Life in 12 Steps

“Knowledge studies others, wisdom is self-known…”— Lao Tzu

“Love is the very difficult understanding that something other than the self is real.” — Iris Murdoch.

Armstrong’s new vook, A Compassionate Life in 12 Steps, outlines the Charter for Compassion principles in twelve educational steps. Just as an addict is trained to overcome addiction in AA’s Twelve Steps programs, Armstrong propounds that each of us can learn practical steps through which to overcome the habit of egocentrism — as crippling an addiction as any.

Another metaphor that Armstrong employs in her vook is based on “The Hero’s Journey.” In seeking to practice compassion — a madly difficult art — each of us embarks upon what designer Jennifer Arrington describes in the Chapter 2 video as “not an easy journey.”

We can all use training in the skill of compassion. A Compassionate Life in 12 Steps, told both in writing and in video, per the Vook format, is Armstrong’s bold introduction to her method.

“Skeptics often say that the golden rule does not work. But this is not a doctrine that you have to believe. It is a method ~ and a method can only be judged if you put it into practice and see whether or not it is effective.” — Karen Armstrong, A Compassionate Life in 12 Steps

Armstrong is neither the first nor the only writer who’s endeavored to mentor fellow humans in living compassionately with others. But her “Twelve Step Program,” and the vook format that intersperses videos with written text and online links, is uniquely tailored to readers today.

I appreciated her practical demonstrations of the twelve steps, and her scholarly quotes from sages like Milton and Shakespeare, as well as from religious texts. I also found the range of people interviewed in the videos moving and inspirational.

This well-taken, subtle vook can be referenced endlessly, every day, and always provide something new.

A recent edition of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin published by Vook under ordinary circumstances would not merit a review since publishers have kept the autobiography on the market for well over 200 years.  In addition to being the grandfather of the self-help, do-it-yourself industry — so much a part of the American ethos — Franklin was an inventor and printer. How fitting then that Vook, innovators of book production, have made The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin available for purchase online in a new form of enriched ebook. 

With this technology readers may access features such as video and animation that help to introduce the classical material. The vook format also allows readers to connect directly through social media with friends or fellow students, all without switching platforms.

Yet, trying to review a vook book makes me decidedly uncomfortable, all too aware of my limited computer skills. I think of myself as a third or fourth grader rather than as a postgraduate student. What I have to fall back on is my subjective response to this new form of reading.  Clearly I’m no expert.  It’s the first time I’ve read and witnessed a vook. With those caveats, here is my subjective summation.

The supplementary information presented in the videos was illuminating. I enjoyed the live commentary of experts. For example, I learned about Franklin’s relationship with his wife and his flirtations with French women after her death. The flesh-and-blood Benjamin Franklin that emerged complements his portrait on the $100 bill.
 
I would have appreciated more variety in the prints and paintings selected to enhance the text. The videographers need not have limited themselves to the few existing portraits of Franklin, and might have shown more scenes and artifacts of life in the Philadelphia of his time.
 
Excitingly, there is room for Vook to grow and innovate further, to creatively extend this new format. I plan to return to the site for additional purchases. My guess is that Franklin would approve of this invention — and be pleased to be part of its timely debut.

As you might imagine, Leda Meredith knows many local farmers who sell their fresh produce in the stalls that line Union Square Park. As a “pro” local shopper, she had these tips for me, more of an “impulse buyer:”

Walk around and compare prices before buying. You might find the same potatoes or zucchini for $1.00 less a pound at another vendor’s table.

Learn what food is not only in season, but what’s at its peak. “This is a win/win situation,” Leda explained. “When produce is in season it not only costs less but tastes better.” Pages 50-53 of her Locavore’s Handbook detail not only the harvest seasons, but the dates when various foods are most available. For example, summer in the Northeast is fruit season.

Ask how to store food. Some foods should not be refrigerated because their texture and flavor will deteriorate. Other food can be canned, frozen, dried for the long run, or stored more immediately to best effect in green produce bags. Leda provides a lowdown on storing food in Chapters 8 and 9 of The Locavore’s Handbook.

The name and reputation of Henry Luce, born 112 years ago, has shrunk from the heyday of his media empire (TIME, LIFE and FORTUNE magazines) in the forties and fifties. Today, the circulation of TIME has declined, and LIFE has ceased publication.

But growing up in Detroit in the forties, before TV and the Internet affected the availability of news stories, I remember depending on TIME and LIFE to tell me what was happening in the big world.  For a young college student eager to keep up with the news, Luce’s magazines were required reading, an assignment I looked forward to completing each week. I wasn’t the only one hooked on LIFE. Based on polling data of Americans, George Gallup reported that the biggest break a movie could get was a two-page layout of still photographs in LIFE. Publicity of this kind was more useful than a page-one story in all newspapers published in the United States.

Living in Detroit was like living in a remote province, away from important news being made in Washington and London, far from theater openings on Broadway and new books being published in New York.  To me Henry R. Luce was a “macher,” a big shot charting the future goals of America.  For example, the “American Century” referenced in the subtitle of Brinkley’s new Luce biography was the title of an essay Luce wrote in the February 7, 1941 issue of LIFE. This messianic view of Americans civilization harkened back to the missionary work of his father, a Presbyterian minister laboring in China, where Luce was born, to spread the word of Christianity.  According to son Henry, “It now becomes our time to be the powerhouse from which the ideals spread throughout the world and do their mysterious work of lifting the life of mankind from the level of the beasts to what the Psalmists called a little lower than the angels.”  

Henry Luce was also a figure of envy, having married the beautiful, beguiling, Claire Booth, author of the successful Broadway show and movie, THE WOMEN, elected to the U. S. Congress and later appointed ambassador to Italy.  Subsequent biographies of Claire Booth Luce show that this second marriage was one of Henry’s ventures that turned sour.  

I don’t plan to read Brinkley’s biography any more than I plan to read a biography of other American journalists such as Horace Greeley, Joseph Pulitzer or William Randolph Hearst. The Australian Rupert Murdoch? Well, that sounds like a tempting read.

PUBLISH OR PERISH is a well-worn adage in academia. Teachers anxious to gain appointment at the college or university level and those seeking to secure a tenured appointment know the importance of having their work validated particularly by a peer-reviewed publication or a respected publishing firm.

For several years I was a member of the Promotion and Appointment Committee at the University at Albany, a SUNY institution. In reviewing a candidate’s thick dossier covering an academic career, we members also paid special attention to student ratings for a teacher, and the record of Community Service.  For example, on what university committees had the candidate served?  What kinds of service did the candidate perform for the profession, for the local city or state?  

Of these three criteria—publication, teaching performance, and community service—committee members informally acknowledged the most important criterion was publication.  To illustrate its importance, Barack Obama was never considered as a candidate for tenure at the School of Law, University of Chicago where he was a lecturer because his publication record was so poor.   

Digital changes in book publishing and in professional journals make selecting the best candidates for appointment and promotion even more difficult than in past years.  Publishing e-books and real books have become so easy today.  I once knew the names of a few vanity presses.  Now there are so many more of them.  Also. self-publishing has gained a new legitimacy. Large booksellers such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble are anxious to make digital books available to their customers.

Today, available options are different for an author whose work cannot find a publisher.  Karen McQuestion, according to a story in The Wall Street Journal, tried for ten years to interest a publisher in her novel. Having failed, she decided to produce an online version, and in eleven months her e-book, A Scattered Life, sold 36,000 copies.  This cautionary tale raises two questions.

First, was it wise for the author not to accept the decision of the New York publishing world?  The money McQuestion put up to publish the novel has been paid back and yielded her a profit. But there was no guarantee of that. Traditionally authors expect an advance rather than an expenditure after completing a manuscript. A candidate seeking promotion as a tenured professor has even more at stake in terms of future earnings and maintaining a reputation as a scholar.  Would she be justified in seeking to support her dossier by paying for the publication of her professional work?

Second, were the New York publishers mistaken? The large sale of Karen McQuestion’s novel raises doubt about the decisions of the gatekeepers of publication.  A paperback edition will soon be published, and a Hollywood producer has paid for a film option.  Obviously, the decisions of publishers can be mistaken.  The decisions of committee members on promotion and appointment committees at universities can also be mistaken.  

Perhaps it’s time to overhaul "Publish or Perish." We readers  know that much of what has been published on paper does not represent high quality work. Publishers must publish to stay in business. Professional journals must keep to their schedule of publication. Always suspect, the need for Publish or Perish seems outmoded in the new Age of "Digital Publication."